URAC releases specialty pharmacy report
URAC has released its “Five Year Specialty Pharmacy Report: Making a Difference with Measurement.”
As the leading pharmacy accreditor in the country, URAC has collected performance data from 451 unique specialty pharmacies—representing 211 million prescriptions from 2018 to 2022—and identified significant trends in patient care quality.
Over this time period, the number of pharmacies reporting data to URAC grew by 29%. Tracking this data elevates accreditation from a one-time seal of approval to an ongoing quality improvement project—encouraging accredited organizations to continually work towards greater safety and better health outcomes for patients.
[Read more: Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy earns accreditations from URAC, ACHC]
Key Findings:
- Growing importance of quality monitoring: With prescriptions on the rise and healthcare spending under greater scrutiny each year, monitoring quality of care in the specialty pharmacy market is more important than ever.
- Lack of industry standards: While benchmarks exist for consumer satisfaction and workflow productivity, there are no industry standards for assessing specialty pharmacy performance.
- Improvement in call center performance: Over the five-year period, URAC-accredited pharmacies responded to patient calls within 30-seconds 75% of the time, improving to 86% by 2023.
- Dispensing accuracy enhancements: URAC-accredited pharmacies reported 19 dispensing errors per 100,000 prescriptions—a rate of less than 1%. More than 1 in 5 URAC-accredited pharmacies reported zero dispensing errors.
[Read more: Report finds increase in specialty drug trend, spend]
- Challenges in distribution accuracy: Distribution accuracy performance declined significantly during the first year of the pandemic, with URAC-accredited pharmacies reporting an error rate of less than 1% in distributed prescriptions.
- Turnaround time trends: Turnaround times have gradually risen from 4.4 days in 2019 to an average of about 6 days since 2021, partly due to post-pandemic delays in receiving medications.
[Read more: Report: Specialty drug trend, costs will continue to rise]