New data from Surescripts shows that patients are getting more affordable prescriptions faster and with less hassle
Providers nationwide are increasingly adopting prescription price transparency tools at the point of care to positively impact the quality of U.S. healthcare, according to the new Surescripts 2018 Impact Report: Prescription Price Transparency.
From 2017 to 2018, provider adoption of Real-Time Prescription Benefit grew by 1,338 percent. And the monthly number of benefit checks performed by these prescribers at the point of care surged from 298,000 in January 2018 to 6.3 million in December 2018. This growth was driven by the fact that most electronic health records (EHR) vendors, representing 80 percent of all prescribers nationwide, have chosen to implement Real-Time Prescription Benefit.
With connections to the country’s leading pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), prescribers can use the service, integrated with their EHR, to access accurate, patient-specific information for 76 percent of all U.S. patients. As a result, many prescribers delivered measurable cost savings to their patients in 2018.
The leading specialties utilizing Real-Time Prescription Benefit to inform the prescribing process included family practice, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry and cardiology. On average, psychiatrists saved patients the most, at $228 per prescription. Medications in some therapeutic classes delivered more savings than others.
For example, when presented with lower-cost alternatives, prescribers used Real-Time Prescription Benefit to save their patients an average of $105 per prescription for antidepressants and $88 per prescription of blood glucose-lowering medication (excluding insulin). The Surescripts 2018 Impact Report: Prescription Price Transparency will be highlighted at HIMSS19.
