RxLightning partners with health systems, physician practices, specialty pharmacies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers to streamline and accelerate the specialty medication onboarding experience. In this blog post, we focus on some of the key issues pertinent to specialty pharmacies. Check out our full blog to see how we support other key stakeholders.
In today’s competitive landscape, specialty pharmacies face many challenges that threaten their efficiency, profitability, and ability to provide superior patient care. Unfortunately, pharmacies of all sizes are leveraging obsolete intake workflows which deteriorate the enrollment experience for providers, patients, and pharmacists.
While pharmacies are one of the final interaction points in the medication access journey, there are still a number of hurdles that arise which can derail medication onboarding and adherence. From increasing dispensing costs to the demand for streamlined enrollment experiences, pharmacies must continuously innovate to stay ahead of the curve.
Competing for Script Volumes in the Rapidly Changing Pharmacy Landscape
Every day, prescribers must make the decision which pharmacy to send their specialty medication prescriptions to. While some drugs must be prescribed within a Limited Distribution Drug (LDD) or payer-mandated network, many are able to be filled at a wide variety of pharmacy locations. So why would a prescriber choose to send a prescription to your pharmacy? Typically, they would look for a superior enrollment/intake workflow – with limited hurdles, phone calls, and faxes – best-in-class services like prior authorization and financial assistance support, and complete transparency into the patient journey.
When one or more of these capabilities is lacking, a prescriber may choose to send their prescription somewhere else, diminishing your pharmacy’s top line revenues. Today, providers consider the entire enrollment experience and support options when making prescription decisions. Specialty pharmacies must differentiate themselves by offering seamless, digital enrollment processes and robust services that aid in the onboarding experience (while not breaking the bank).
RxLightning’s digital enrollment solutions empower pharmacies to do just that, leveraging fully-digital intake workflows to accelerate medication approval and speed-to-fill. By offering rules-based forms and required fields, missing information becomes a thing of the past, while standardized data retrieval ensures accuracy, efficiency, and transparency into the medication access journey for all key stakeholders. By creating a superior experience for patients and providers, specialty pharmacies can differentiate themselves and capture more script volumes than ever before.
Dispensing Costs and Margin Pressures
Unfortunately, gone are the days when script volumes alone determine a pharmacy’s success. Dispensing costs continue to soar, significantly impacting pharmacy margins. Inefficient intake processes, high pharmacy labor costs, and support services costs only exacerbate the problem. Additionally, supplies, training, transaction fees, facility costs, and various other systems claim a significant portion of a pharmacy’s revenue. Research shows that total dispensing costs for specialty medications range from $75 to $500+, and without a solution, many pharmacies will be unable to survive.
RxLightning offers two lifelines. The first is our Digital Enrollment Workflow Solution. With fully-integrated and electronic intake processes, we eliminate manual paperwork and missing information on forms. This can shorten the time it takes for a pharmacy team to receive, approve, and dispense and specialty medication. Real-Time Benefit Check and electronic Prior Authorization tools also enable seamless coverage and insurance approval. By digitizing and streamlining these processes, teams can ‘do more with less,’ managing higher quantities of enrollments and offering superior services without increasing expenditures.
The second opportunity is RxLightning’s Affordability Queue – a revolutionary solution that automatically matches and enrolls patients in foundation options when funds become available. This solution reduces patient leakage and maximizes pharmacy revenue by enabling prescription fills, without having to worry about taking on bad debt. By identifying and enrolling in foundation funds, patients can pay for their medications and initiate their therapy regimen without delays due to financial burden.
Supporting Specialty Pharmacies with a Multi-Pronged Approach
With rising dispensing costs and increased competition for scripts, pharmacies must: reduce administrative burden and time spent on each medication enrollment, optimize their use of foundation dollars and affordability programs, and improve the patient and provider experience. Innovative solutions are essential to help pharmacies thrive.
RxLightning’s multi-pronged pharmacy strategy helps overcome these challenges through digital enrollment processes and Affordability Queue, which eliminate cumbersome paperwork and manual processes, while accelerating speed-to-therapy and providing complete visibility into the enrollment process for all stakeholders.
We encourage you to join us on our mission to create a better specialty medication experience – one that is efficient, accessible, and patient-centric. Together, we can transform the way medication onboarding is managed and ensure that every patient receives care at lightning speed.
To learn more about how RxLightning can transform your pharmacy’s operations and drive success in a competitive market, reach out today.
