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Hyphen, a healthcare technology company that enables care organizations, providers and community organizations to share data and collaborate, is partnering with RedSail Technologies' BestRx to provide its Pharmacy Assistant tool to more than 6,000 community pharmacies in New York and New Jersey.
Pharmacy Assistant provides pharmacists with information on patient medications, such as the need for refills, education or vaccinations. Hyphen says each action is logged to allow insurers to connect pharmacy engagement with financial incentives.
The partnership with BestRx will allow Hyphen, part of the CMS Interoperability Framework that the White House recently announced, to connect more than 6,000 New York and New Jersey-based pharmacies to Pharmacy Assistant.
"We're already integrated with PrimeRx through Micro Merchant, but this is really the big story. We're really excited to be able to partner with BestRx and expand our footprint and power more pharmacies," Suzanne Wogelius, vice president of product management at Hyphen, told MobiHealthNews.
"It really positions Hyphen for national growth, and we hope to move beyond Healthfirst."
Healthfirst is a not-for-profit health plan serving Long Island, New York City and the Hudson Valley. It was the first insurance plan to adopt Pharmacy Assistant and has 400 participating pharmacies.
"When we look at Healthfirst, and we look at where their members are going, that's really what we want to capitalize on," Wogelius said.
"We want to connect with pharmacies that members actually go to, and we feel like we've exhausted enough with Micro Merchants' PrimeRx, and then, we started looking at where members go when they're going to pharmacies that have BestRx. So, it's really about expanding our network, our network opportunity, so that we can be flexible."
Bhavesh Modi, vice president of pharmacy at Healthfirst, told MobiHealthNews that the collaboration with Hyphen allows it to empower community pharmacies to take action on things like medication adherence.
"The unique thing about Healthfirst is the majority of our members in the Medicare plan use independent pharmacies as their primary pharmacy," Modi said.
"We don't have as many of our members in that line of business using chains, and so working with independents is challenging because, as the name implies, they're independent, so they are not mobilized around one single thing. We needed to find a way to unify our ability to work with the pharmacies, and that's what Pharmacy Assistant did for us."
Wogelius said the RedSail collaboration will allow the company to expand nationwide, beyond Healthfirst because the footprint of community pharmacies RedSail has is so large.
"They are national, and they're owned by RedSail, and RedSail has a few others – they have Pioneer as well as BestRx – and so it really positions us to provide more of a connected network," Wogelius said.
Modi explained, "I think there's a desire for independent pharmacies to be able to collaborate with health plans, and this is the way that they can do it."
