Inovalon a technology company providing advanced, cloud-based platforms empowering data-driven healthcare, announced a five-year engagement with AllianceRx Walgreens Prime to provide highly differentiated, cloud-based capabilities to the healthcare marketplace with the implementation of a specialty pharmacy platform. AllianceRx Walgreens Prime is the combined central specialty and home delivery pharmacy formed by Walgreens and pharmacy benefit manager Prime Therapeutics LLC (Prime).
Specialty pharmacy is a uniquely high-value segment of the healthcare ecosystem that is of increasing importance to payers, pharmaceutical companies, and patients alike. Specialty pharmacy focuses on high-cost and high-complexity pharmacological care. Driven by accelerating discoveries in pharmacological treatments, the rising number of patients with highly complex and chronic disease conditions, and the increasing application of precision medicine, the U.S. specialty pharmacy market has grown from approximately $98 billion in 2010 to $178 billion in 2015, and it is expected to continue to expand to an estimated $282 billion by 20201. All segments of the healthcare ecosystem—payers, providers, pharma, patients, and the elements of their associated care delivery matrix—rely on the capabilities of specialty pharmacy for their own respective care, quality and economic goals.
The Inovalon ONE Platform’s capabilities allow for AllianceRx Walgreens Prime to be significantly differentiated in the marketplace, reducing time-to-fill and costs and improving quality assurance, while empowering advanced functionality, greater flexibility, operational efficiency, and a focus on clinical and quality outcomes.
Referred to as ScriptMed Cloud, the specialty pharmacy configuration of the Inovalon ONE Platform leverages a wide array of existing proprietary technology toolsets within the Platform (known as Components) as well as a Module of eight newly developed Components that leverage Creehan specialty pharmacy expertise engineered in cloud native-microservice architecture. The specialized configuration of the Inovalon ONE Platform brings to the marketplace significant advancements empowering a new generation of specialty pharmacy capabilities.
Examples of features enabled through the platform include:
- Sophisticated clinical protocols powered by patient-specific data and advanced analytics
- Connectivity with EHRs, HIEs, payer systems, and provider sites to speed necessary data capture and authorization processes
- Modular design allowing health plans and provider systems to integrate more easily with in-house capabilities and other third-party pharmacy solutions
- Real-time analytics and data accessibility to timely inform clinical interactions and improve patient experience
- Simultaneous multi-stakeholder coordination enabling parallel processes related to each unique patient’s needs, materially accelerating time-to-fill improvements
- Real-time process coordination of patient-level and provider-level data with elements of care management, referral management, order fulfillment, order management, inventory management, revenue cycle management, and relevant contract management supporting payer and pharmaceutical manufacturer requirements
- Granular business intelligence tracking and reporting to deliver insights on system, financial, clinical, and operational status and performance in real time
Preparation for ScriptMed Cloud began during the summer of 2017, with subsequent expansions of Inovalon’s cloud datacenters and cloud-based software design and development. Unique to the project launch is the simultaneous support of enterprise software during the phased delivery of cloud-based functionality. When completed, all of the AllianceRx Walgreens Prime’s operations will be run from the Inovalon cloud-based Platform.
