New tools, digital portal put Health Mart owners on ‘Pathway’ to better clinical, business outcomes
With all the challenges facing independent pharmacy today, there are also many opportunities for owners who are committed to driving greater efficiency both in the clinical as well as the operations side of the business, and are able to measure and demonstrate the value as healthcare shifts to an outcomes-based model. To help independents rise to the opportunity, McKesson unveiled a number of new solutions and tools at McKesson ideaShare 2016 last month in Chicago, including two that company executives are calling game-changing — the Health Mart Pathway to Better Pharmacy Performance and Profit℠ and myHealthMart℠.
Continuing with its mission to help level the playing field and enable independents to grow their business, Health Mart president Steve Courtman and chief pharmacist Crystal Lennartz walked Drug Store News through the two new solutions, how each works and talked about why pharmacy owners need to seriously consider adopting both, in a private interview from McKesson ideaShare.
According to Courtman, both the Health Mart Pathway and myHealthMart speak to the heart of a core strategy “to have the best patient outcomes in the marketplace,” he said.
“More than 2,000 of our stores now have quality measures in the top 20%, that’s 44% of our network — I want to be at 100%,” explained Courtman, acknowledging his fondness for making big, bold goals. “We want to be No. 1 across every pharmacy-related Star Rating measure for every single payer across the country.”
The new Health Mart Pathway is an easy-to-follow roadmap to help accomplish that, he said. “The industry is moving from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement,” Courtman added. “With the Health Mart Pathway and other tools, we are enabling our independents to stay independent and to thrive,” Courtman said. “All of the things we are doing are about enabling our stores to be successful.”
“We’ve been on this journey with our customers for the last three years, helping them see what’s happening in the industry and getting educated around quality measures,” noted Crystal Lennartz, Health Mart chief pharmacist. “The Health Mart Pathway is really their words of how they went from one step to the next.”
The new Health Mart Pathway provides a strategic roadmap to help independent pharmacies enhance profitability and clinical performance, and demonstrate the value they can contribute to the local healthcare ecosystem. There are five key steps:
• Get educated on the challenges and opportunities. “Health Mart is the go-to adviser to help independent pharmacy owners to get educated and to set goals,” Courtman said. Actions for success include staying up-to-date on current events and policies effecting retail pharmacy and knowing how the clinical measures impact your revenue. Health Mart provides a number of tools to assist with this, Courtman explained, including access to EQuIPP™, a performance information management platform that makes unbiased, benchmarked performance data available to health provider stakeholders offered via Pharmacy Quality Solutions, a leading provider of performance management services for payer and pharmacy organizations; AccessHealth Managed Care Solutions; and Health Mart University.
In addition Health Mart also leverages a peer-to-peer approach to learning. Last year, it hosted more than 100 local Town Hall meetings across the country. “We use owners to educate and share barriers and how they overcame things,” Lennartz said. “We’ll take that same approach this year with the Health Mart Pathway.”
McKesson also hosted a special Health Mart Peer Networking Session during McKesson ideaShare 2016, with both Health Mart operators as well as regional McKesson staff on hand to help share best practices. “Our Health Mart owners want to make Health Mart better,” Courtman said.
• Monitor clinical and financial performance. This includes setting baseline performance measures and creating an action plan for pharmacy staff on how to improve those performance measures. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Courtman said.
myHealthMart, an online portal, which also debuted at McKesson ideaShare, enables Health Mart pharmacies to proactively measure business and clinical performance, providing access to personalized, up-to-date data and insights about their own pharmacy operations.
• Adopt medication synchronization. Adopting med sync in order to offer more robust patient care and revenue-generating services “is probably the toughest change to make in store because it’s impacting operations and workflow,” Courtman said. “To help take some of the risk out of the equation, Health Mart has hired an implementation team of experienced pharmacists to go out to Health Mart locations to help owners navigate the changes. Med Sync allows independent pharmacies to improve efficiency and increase capacity without adding staff, and enables pharmacists to identify additional patient needs at the medication pickup,” he explained.
• Engage the patient during pickup. After implementing med sync, Health Mart pharmacists can use the monthly appointments to review adherence barriers, identify possible gaps in care and provide such additional clinical services as a flu vaccination or a comprehensive medication review. “It’s about reinvesting in your business — developing the patient services that will help you engage the patient during pickup,” Courtman said.
• Build deeper provider partnerships. “Providers want to send you patients because you provide better care,” Courtman said. “Build this credibility, collect these outcomes and demonstrate the value of these patient relationships.” Health Mart tools to support independent operators in this effort include the Health Mart Marketing Hub and the Physician Outreach Program, he explained.
“Health Mart values the independent’s identity and the Health Mart Pathway helps our customers thrive and overcome some of the challenges within the industry,” Erin Kiri, senior manager brand strategy at Health Mart, told Drug Store News. “Change is very hard. The Health Mart Pathway is really meant to help them navigate through those changes.”
Introducing myHealthMart
To get a better appreciation of the new myHealthMart portal, Drug Store News sat down with John Priskorn, senior director retail solutions development at McKesson.
MyHealthMart provides a complete picture of their pharmacy’s clinical and business performance and one-stop access to Health Mart programs and resources, he explained. “The overarching theme of the myHealthMart platform is to create one-click access to various programs, services and data that Health Mart, as well as our third-party partners, are offering,” Priskorn said. “We also have a centralized place for all the various Health Mart educational, clinical and marketing programs that we offer.”
Using myHealthMart, pharmacies can access personaliz