Cardinal Health's town hall series bolsters community pharmacy practice
DUBLIN, Ohio — Cardinal Health on Thursday kicked off it annual "Reach for the Stars" town hall format to help pharmacists better understand how their healthcare operations can contribute to CMS Star Ratings, as well as how to ensure accurate reimbursement payments in narrow networks, how to streamline pharmacy efficiencies and how to improve patient relationships and health outcomes.
“Pharmacy performance against CMS Star Ratings measures may influence access to pharmacy preferred networks, pay-for-performance programs run by health plans and an ability to drive patient engagement and adherence,” stated Steve Lawrence, SVP retail independent sales at Cardinal Health. “It’s more important than ever for community pharmacies to understand how to ‘Reach for the Stars’ and improve their pharmacy performance contributing to CMS Star Ratings.”
Open to all community pharmacies, the Reach for the Stars town hall tour will be making 31 stops this year to address this complex topic through specific actions pharmacists can take to improve their business, and most importantly, patient outcomes.
To keep the community pharmacy at the forefront of care and CMS Star Ratings, the focus of the town halls is:
CMS Star Rating education: Healthcare continues to shift from a fee-for-service model to a value-driven model. To ensure pharmacies understand this ever-changing landscape, the town halls offer a continuing education credit revolving around what star ratings are now, what they will be in the future and how this impacts community pharmacy;
The journey to value-driven pharmacy: A phased approach to incorporating a value-based revenue stream in a community pharmacy setting through the implementation of patient care services;
The impact of pharmacy performance on preferred Medicare networks: Pharmacy Benefit Managers are implementing various strategies with their preferred networks to improve their CMS Star Ratings. Pharmacists need to understand how their performance impacts these preferred networks. The town halls take a deeper look at what it means to be in a preferred network; and
Provide personalized patient care solutions: Each patient faces different adherence challenges, so to be successful, pharmacies must provide a variety of solutions. The town halls provide actionable ways for a pharmacy to identify and measure pharmacy performance through EQuIPP, as well as the improved Cardinal Health Reimbursement Consulting Services dashboard. Performance can also be measured through Cardinal Health MedSync Advantage, a new tool that easily identifies patients qualifying for medication synchronization.
“The future of independent pharmacy will revolve around change,” said John Balch, pharmacist and owner at The PharmaCare Network. “The successful independent will embrace MTM, immunizations, adherence and compliance and will become the shining star of their community.”
