How a connected pharmacy partnership helps physicians and care teams deliver high-quality care for complex populations.
Through AnewHealth’s ExactCare Pharmacy, care teams get medication reconciliation across every prescriber, adherence monitoring between visits, clinical recommendations when something looks wrong, and visibility into medication changes as they happen rather than at the next appointment.
For the practice, that means fewer surprises. For the patient, it means the right medications, a clear understanding of why they matter, and the support to actually take them.
The following is a transcript of our conversation with Brady Steineck, MD, MBA, CEO of Community Health Care, Inc. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
We’ve been very satisfied with our partnership with AnewHealth. Our company is located in Northeast Ohio, clustered around the cities of Canton and Akron, so we are very blue collar, mostly suburban and rural office locations.
We were introduced to AnewHealth and really were introduced to the philosophy, to the way that AnewHealth provides care and medication packaging, and just the way that it could really help our patients with adherence.
As we’ve built the relationship and as time has gone on, there’s a lot of trust built up. There’s a lot of just overall really feeling more confident in recommendations and in the care that we’re providing as a team.
I love that AnewHealth provides case studies on our actual patients. As we’ve built those and seen those examples build up, it’s given our docs and our providers and nurse practitioners a lot of confidence.
The meaningful thing, I think, is just having a real pharmacist on the team, actually looking at medication lists, looking at interactions, making recommendations, actually helping us with duplication of therapy or getting the right medication in the patient’s home, or even kind of reconciling when a specialist or other provider makes a medication change that gets sent to the pharmacy that we didn’t know about, letting us know about that.
We know that for patients with certain chronic conditions, like diabetes or heart disease or heart failure, that the medications that are recommended for them actually can prevent morbidity and mortality, prevent hospital utilization, prevent emergency room visits, and in many cases, lengthen their life.
And so for us, it’s extremely important that our patients are on the right medication and that we partner with them to make sure that they understand why they’re on these medications and why it’s important that they take them as prescribed.
To know that the adherence rates with AnewHealth approach 100% in those really key classes has been a huge development for us, a big improvement over before. In many cases, we didn’t even have visibility into what our adherence rates were.
That was a huge win for the partnership because it was an ally that we didn’t have access to before that could help us really figure out what was best for the patient. And so knowing that these patients are getting the medications delivered to their doorstep every month and that our adherence rates are so high has been huge.
As physicians, we are confident in the way that we can take care of patients, but having a pharmacist that is a partner with us can give us a lot of confidence, because we’re able to ask questions at the point of care instead of maybe the patient leaves the office and then we have to call a stranger at the local retail pharmacy to ask a question. In this case, we’re much more connected.
We’ve been very satisfied with our partnership with AnewHealth. We feel like our patients get consistent medication delivery, and of course, adherence monitoring and high-quality care because of our collaboration as a partnership. And so overall, we’ve been really happy.
Tell us about your patient population and we’ll walk you through how the model works, what your care team would see day to day, and what it takes to get started.