Key Insights

• “As we think about P3 Health Partners, we take care of about 120,000 Medicare Advantage and ACO REACH populations across four different states.” – Sarah Bussman
• “Medication Adherence isn’t just a quality metric. It’s really a clinical insight into everything else that’s happening with that patient.” – Bussman
• “High-quality scores on medication adherence mean your patient is taking their medicine.” – Paul Fleming

Key Insights

• “Medication adherence is a full-time job. Everything about medication adherence is time-sensitive. We were trying to do the best that we could with very little information to work on. And in fact, it became so disheartening that during our monthly calls with payers, once we get to those medication adherence slides, you heard this collective sigh from our team, and we just had to say, look, we’ll do what we can, but we don’t have the time to commit to med adherence to make it a successful program.” – Fleming
• “We’ve got 18 different payer partners, major delays in getting information. Also the burden of having to combine all of that data information together per provider because what provider wants to get a separate list per individual health plan?” – Bussman
• “It just got to the point that there are efforts that help, but again we’re being reactive and it’s incredibly labor-intensive to where we’re not doing the best that we can for enabling our providers or really helping our patients.” – Bussman

Key Insights

• “Those of us in the Medicare Advantage and ACO Reach space, we’re looking at, you know, getting patients coded for what is their disease burden as we’re taking care of them the rest of the year. So I think all of those things become competing priorities and it also unfortunately sometimes creates silos within organizations.” – Bussman
• “The benefit of having a pharmacy team, whether embedded that you can help train on their workflows or supportive to your organization, is that they can sit back and look at the longitudinal view of a patient to say, here’s all the medications you’re on, here are the barriers or side effects that may exist because of the swoop of medications they’re on, and that really provides a different level of insight to the provider that unfortunately they just don’t always have time for. – Bussman
• “Unfortunately, it’s kind of easy, I think, to deprioritize medication adherence because, hey, the clock started, you know, we’ve got a clean slate with these patients, right? And then all of a sudden we’re in April and you’ve got to start working when you’ve already dropped a point on your score and that’s not coming back. – Flemming

Key Insights

• “Historically with us, the net effect of us starting late is two and three star scores at the end of the year because it’s hard. You can’t crawl out of that hole that you took early in the year.” – Fleming
• “It’s essential to start early and that’s why we’re so thankful for Stellus because it allows us to focus on other quality measures, other goals, other projects and with Stellus, we’re in good hands with them to watch those scores again, that false sense of security from seeing five stars up until June.” – Fleming
• “Look how many points come from medication adherence, but it also helped us really create a road map for our business side to say it is beneficial for us to expand this to all of our populations, serve all of our providers and all of our patients, which I think is really exciting.” – Bussman
• “We learned that reminders alone are not going to drive sustainable adherence impact. And so what we’ve really done is also focus in from adherence to the rest of your quality measures. Each provider group really needs their own individualized care plan.” – Bussman
• “Stellus being on board and right next to us, they said, “You know, we’re here to help you to do the things that you maybe don’t have the time for or some of the outreach initiatives and data mining or data aggregation to make your life easier.” – Bussman

Key Insights

• “Even though we have a fairly large provider network, we have a very small centralized team. So it tells us that we need to be thinking outside of the box and we don’t need to try to do it all in house. We need to realize when we don’t have the strength or the time to do it and start looking at other vendors to help us out.” – Fleming
• “We’re looking at vendors that can help us with that and maybe be more mobile and reach out to our patients or have them closer to home for the patient.” – Fleming

Key Insights

• “Healthcare is a team sport in general, right? And you’ve got to keep everybody practicing at the top of their license. And so finding partners, slash vendors, slash whatever you want to call them that really can become part of your internal team. I think it wraps around the provider.” – Bussman
• “Having those teams develop a relationship with the provider helps kind of ease that flow and get our vendor support pushed into the provider office that much more smoothly.” – Bussman
• “It’s really: How do we partner together? You’re not just a vendor that’s going to go out and call my patients. Let’s make sure we collectively deliver the information to the provider, model what the communication to the patient is going to look like and then make sure that the data sharing is top notch so that we are then supporting our providers that much more and contacting the right patients at the right time and getting the care provided to really support them.” – Bussman
• “When Stellus came on board and said we have pharmacists and pharmacy techs … you’ve invested in the right staff to do the job. And I think that’s how you’re kind of able to seamlessly integrate it into our team is because we’re already here. You’re just extra pharmacists that we have working with us who know what they’re talking about, who can talk to the patients, who have the same skill set that we do in the office.” – Fleming