NCPDP Brings National Awareness to its Specialty Pharmacy Work Group at Asembia's 15th Annual Specialty Pharmacy Summit and NCPDP's May Work Group Meetings
Work Group Focuses on Standardization Efforts to Speed Time to Drug Therapy
NEW YORK, April 25, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Committed to securing timely access to specialty medications for patients with chronic or complex conditions, NCPDP brings national awareness to its Specialty Pharmacy Work Group initiatives. The efforts include speaker presentations to Asembia's 15th Annual Specialty Pharmacy Summit, the nation's largest gathering in specialty pharmacy, and NCPDP's Work Group Meetings convening in May.
Cancer, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis and other chronic diseases often require a specialty medication. The current lack of standardization to process a specialty medication means it could take days, weeks and even months for a patient to get access to a prescribed treatment regimen—potentially threatening patient outcomes. NCPDP and its members are dedicated to enabling safe and timely access to these therapies.
"Imagine a loved one diagnosed with a complex or chronic disease that requires a specialty medication," said Lee Ann Stember, President & CEO of NCPDP. "We often take for granted the swift time to fill prescriptions, but that's not the case with specialty medications. We want to make the prescriber's job and patient journey easier by standardizing the many manual processes to speed time and access to specialty drug therapies."
The three sessions at Asembia aim to increase awareness of NCPDP's Specialty Pharmacy Work Group (WG18) and encourage attendees to participate in NCPDP's critically important work. Asembia's 15th Annual Specialty Pharmacy Summit is held April 29 to May 2 in Las Vegas and draws thousands of senior executives, key decision makers and other stakeholders in specialty pharmacy.
Three sessions at Asembia's Specialty Pharmacy Summit focus on NCPDP's Work in Specialty Pharmacy
- John Hill, NCPDP's Executive Vice President & GM, and Pooja Babbrah, MBA, WG18 Co-Chair and PBM Practice Lead at Point-of-Care Partners, will co-present "How NCPDP is Improving Speed to Specialty Therapy." The session introduces attendees to NCPDP and reviews the specialty pharmacy work group's initiatives underway to automate manual processes and transactions to support specialty management.
- For the second session, Julie Hessick, R.Ph., WG18 Co-Chair and Senior Director of Business Development at OneOme, and Jill Helm, Vice-President, Solution Management at Veradigm, will co-present "Real-Time Benefit Check: The Next Revolution in Healthcare." The session examines how RTBC helps reduce medication abandonment, improve medication adherence and outcomes, and enhance patient and provider satisfaction.
- Presenting the third session, "Best Practices for Automating REMS in Workflow," are Babbrah, Shivani Patel, Senior Vice President Clinical Operations & Technology at Asembia, and Mark Sasala, subject matter expert in Specialty Pharmacy Technology at Creehan & Company, an Inovalon Company. The session will examine NCPDP's implementation guide and best practices for REMS transactions for the Telecommunication Standard for pharmacies to meet to dispense medications.
NCPDP's Work Group Meeting, May 5-6
NCPDP's Specialty Pharmacy Work Group will meet May 6 at the Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona.
"Our dedicated pharmacists and stakeholders involved in specialty pharmacy are driven by industry need and personal passion to enable safe and timely access to these therapies," said Stember. "However, for us to develop comprehensive transactions for specialty pharmacy, we need more people, colleagues and business partners willing to share perspectives, knowledge and expertise."
Work Group 18 Specialty Pharmacy Co-Chairs are Babbrah, Hessick and Laura Topor, President, Granada Health, Inc. The work group meets quarterly and oversees the work of four task groups that meet via teleconference calls to work collaboratively with colleagues and competitors alike to develop solutions using NCPDP's consensus-building process.
NCPDP's specialty pharmacy work group will provide an update on the efforts of its four task groups:
- WG18 Specialty Pharmacy Data Exchange Task Group will standardize documentation, reporting or data exchange to support programs and agreements between specialty pharmacy stakeholders such as specialty pharmacies, manufacturers, PBMs, hubs, data aggregators, and payers. This could occur via the creation of new standards or the modification of existing NCPDP standards.
- WG18 Specialty Requirements for ePrescribing Task Group identifies opportunities to support the exchange of information needed before a prescription can be dispensed. This information is provided by the prescriber (or someone in the prescriber's office) and includes additional patient demographic and clinical information, order-specific clinical information and instructions related to delivery of the medication (i.e. to the patient or the clinic, nursing services required). This data would be added to the appropriate SCRIPT Standard and/or Specialized Standard transactions, depending on analysis.
- WG18 Stakeholder Outreach and Education Task Group identifies and provides outreach to specialty pharmacy stakeholders to facilitate engagement in WG18. Educational opportunities will be identified and facilitated based on input from stakeholders.
- WG18 Benefit Coverage Identification Task Group addresses the areas of opportunity related to determining if coverage is through the medical or pharmacy benefit.
The Specialty Pharmacy Work Group will also call for volunteers to pilot NCPDP's Specialty Pharmacy Data Reporting Standard, which supports specialty pharmacy operations and validates contractual obligations via a uniform data format, enabling pharmacies' submissions to multiple manufacturers.
Interested NCPDP members and non-members can click here for information on the May meeting and future events. Task group conference calls are open to NCPDP members and non-members. To participate in a task group, click here.
About NCPDP
Founded in 1977, NCPDP is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited, Standards Development Organization with more than 1,600 members representing virtually every sector of the pharmacy services industry. Our diverse membership provides leadership and healthcare business solutions through education and standards, created using the consensus building process. NCPDP has been named in federal legislation, including HIPAA, MMA, and HITECH. NCPDP members have created standards such as the Telecommunication Standard and Batch Standard, the SCRIPT Standard for ePrescribing, the Manufacturers Rebate Standard and more to improve communication within the pharmacy industry. Our data products include dataQ®, a robust database of information on more than 80,000 pharmacies, resQ™, an industry pharmacy credentialing resource, and HCIdea®, an innovative prescriber database that provides continually updated information on more than 2.5 million prescribers. NCPDP's RxReconn® is a legislative tracking product for real-time monitoring of pharmacy-related state and national legislative and regulatory activity. For more information about NCPDP Standards, Data Services, Products, Educational Programs and Work Group meetings, go online at http://www.ncpdp.org or call 480.477.1000.
SOURCE National Council For Prescription Drug Programs, Inc.
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