DrFirst

Using Pharmacy Data to Paint a More Complete Picture of Patient Health

It may seem obvious: patients’ medication records should be accessible to their healthcare providers. But that’s not always the case.  

Gaps in medication data, duplicate records, and inaccurate information can occur due to incompatible systems and a lack of information-sharing between care settings, putting patients at risk of poor outcomes. Fortunately, collaboration among healthcare leaders is helping to close those gaps.   

Health Gorilla, a national health information network and interoperability platform, recently announced the launch of Pharmacy Data, which allows healthcare professionals to use Patient360 to receive access to medication history for panels of patients, such as those with diabetes or other chronic conditions, including prescription fill, refill, renewal, and prescriber and pharmacy NPI for treatment purposes in ambulatory care settings.  

Powered by a partnership with DrFirst and our MedHx PRM solution, the new offering uses an SFTP process that allows medication history to be queried, returned, deduplicated, and presented within Patient360, enabling streamlined workflows and operational efficiency for ambulatory providers seeking to manage medications across a patient population. 

So, how does more complete patient medication data improve outcomes? That was the topic of a recent panel discussion featuring these industry experts:  

• Jim Jirjis, M.D., M.B.A., Chief Health Information Officer, HCA Healthcare
• Colin Banas, M.D., M.H.A., Chief Medical Officer, DrFirst 
• Shelly Spiro, R.Ph, FASCP, Executive Director, Pharmacy HIT Collaborative  
• Steven Lane, M.D., M.P.H., Chief Medical Officer, Health Gorilla  

“The good news is that we have far more treatments than we used to have,” said Dr. Jirjis. “The bad news is that patients are on far more medications. So, when admitting a patient to the hospital … we’re often seeing a geriatric patient who has upwards of 12 medicines. The amount of time it takes in a time-crunched environment to actually do medication reconciliation well can be 45 minutes.” 

Listen to the recording to hear how technology can help improve care with complete medication data.  

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