Solution Integration Propels Performance at Millennium Physician Group (Part 2)

Contributors

Brittany Orr knows the value of bandwidth and performance. As Vice President of Quality for Millennium Physician Group—one of the largest physician-led groups in the country—Brittany’s daily work and long-term goals focus on finding the right balance of resources that create proven, measurable returns.

In part two of this interview, we discuss: How Brittany approaches that work for a practice that includes 900+ physicians and advanced providers across four states … the conditions for success for introducing new resources to support performance at Millennium … and how the right solution provider has expanded the scope of impact for her in-house quality team.

What does your in-house team look like today, and can you talk a bit more about how they work alongside Stellus Rx to drive Millennium’s success?

Brittany Orr: We have two clinical pharmacists and two pharmacy technicians on-staff today. And because we slowly ramped up our use of Stellus Rx’s services for adherence support, we’ve been able to scale value intentionally.

As an example, our internal team has always offered services like clinical review, medication reconciliation, cost support and drug utilization review to help with managing high-cost medications and similar medications. Now we’ve had a couple of new medication-related measures come from our payers related to polypharmacy.

And so as those internally managed services ramp up, we’re transitioning more of the medication adherence and statin therapy work over to Stellus Rx.

That’s given our internal team more time and ability to focus, to establish and reinforce processes for our disease state management programs and leverage our existing relationships with our providers. And it’s nice because from a comprehensive view of clinical pharmacy services, we’re still able to strike that balance between what we do in-house and what we do through our clinical pharmacy partnership with Stellus Rx. It’s really just one big, integrated group of services that we’re able to provide our patients and our providers.

How was the transition to working with a new solution provider for services that your in-house team was already delivering?

Brittany Orr: My favorite part of this partnership is that our providers and patients would not have even known it happened if we had not sent out a communication. There was no implementation friction that you might anticipate with launching a program like this.

Part of that ease can be attributed to how Stellus Rx folds into all our existing workflows. And the other part is tied to Stellus Rx’s ability to access our electronic medical record directly. EMR access has allowed Stellus Rx pharmacists to have the same information about patients as our primary care physicians. Stellus Rx can message our providers and care teams directly as well, just as if it were coming from my internal pharmacy team.

So, I think if you were to ask all the physicians and advanced providers at Millennium about this partnership, many of them wouldn’t even know. They just assume it’s my team. That’s as much a compliment to Stellus Rx as it is to my team, and certainly it’s a testament to the seamless nature of the integration.

I’m sure this varies across such a large team, but how would you describe physician and advanced provider receptivity to working with a solution provider to improve medication adherence performance?

Brittany Orr: Sure, there’s a lot of variability. Within our footprint, we’ve got some early adopters—some physicians who either know a pharmacist or they worked with one before. And then you have those physicians and advanced providers who are a bit more uncomfortable working with a pharmacist on the team. For the latter group, we’ve overcome that mindset with time, and just showing them how engaged and committed we are to helping their journey to value.

That’s not just value-based care … If we think about all value as quality divided by cost, in any medication topic, pharmacists will only help increase quality and decrease costs. So, the hesitant physicians start to realize those interventions truly support them and their patients.

Working with our medical directors to get buy-in through pilot programs has been tremendously helpful. They’re out there with our physicians doing case rounds and small group meetings to spread the word of how pharmacists can help and support.

And then as a whole, Millennium communicates consistently with our physicians about the business and the business model … about why we need to perform well on quality to be successful in value-based care. That’s certainly changed the way some physicians view the work of pharmacists and the role we can play. It has opened their eyes to the measures we need to perform on, the clinical aspects we can collaborate on and the administrative data and reporting that the pharmacist-led teams do on their behalf behind the scenes. As long as we give them the “why” and the “what we need you to do” from a clinical perspective, many of them have learned to trust that we’re working for their success.

How were you able to manage potential concerns among your own in-house team about bringing on Stellus Rx to take on adherence work? Was there any anxiety about letting go of work that was previously “theirs”?

Brittany Orr: I completely understand those feelings. We approached it by running the two programs side-by-side for a whole performance year: Stellus Rx had 30% of lives under management for adherence, and my Millennium team had the remaining 70% in 2024. That gave me a little bit of extra time to become a believer, to see the two programs and understand the pros and the cons. In that time, I saw how we could be successful together, how Stellus Rx wasn’t a threat; it was more of a partnership.

What our first year most clearly showed was how Stellus Rx enables us to focus on those other pharmacy services with our in-house team. Millennium continues to grow as well, in providers and patients. For us to grow our in-house team to support everything we are now undertaking without a severe drop-off in quality, we probably would have needed to quadruple or quintuple the size of our team.

The other thing is you always have to find your return on investment. Medication adherence and statin therapy always had a very clear return on investment and business case. It’s more challenging to find the same return on investment for other pharmacy services. They can get a little washed out with some of the other things that impact those patients. So, I would say that as long as you can continue to prove the ROI, the pharmacists are always bringing in value. You just have to figure out what else you can bring to the table for your physician group. And having the right partner for adherence certainly gives you more bandwidth to do that.

Published: September 3, 2025