CVS / Pharmacare / MinuteClinic

What a perfect opportunity.  CVS (retail pharmacy chain) owns Pharmacare (pharmacy benefit management company) and owns MinuteClinic (onsite medical clinics).  Right now, if you went to a clinic or physician or hospital, you have created one customer record.  At your retail pharmacy, you have another customer record.  The PBM that processes your pharmacy claims has another customer record of you.  And, the health plan with which you are affiliated has a fourth customer record of you.

There has been talk for years about Personal Health Records (PHR) or Electronic Health Records (EHR).  Although some of the technology exists, the integration and adoption challenges are barriers.  That being said BPM offer some of the core benefits.  The patient can be viewed as having one customer record that follows their path of care.  Each constituent along the way adds information and can view information based on HIPAA guidelines and role based security.

If such a solution made sense, this would create a great opportunity for CVS.  They could capture patients at their clinics and learn about them.  This information could follow the prescription to the retail pharmacy where they could learn more about the patient.  Eventually, they could use the diagnosis data to help inform the treatment suggestions or pharmacy-patient dialog about side-effects.  This data could then be integrated at the PBM level to capture other data from mail pharmacy use and other retailers. 

CVS could see where people stop taking therapy.  MinuteClinic could see where people don't fill prescriptions.  Triggers could be created to generate automatic outbound calls or e-mails or care management calls for follow-up.  But, each event is part of a case management framework so they have history and information to build upon each other.

If you leverage some model like this from a CDHC (Consumer Driven Health Care) perspective, you enable the patient to manage their care by setting reminders for refills, electing to have information pushed to them based on diagnosis codes, seeing reports about costs versus payments, and having the ability to track status of open items - labs, payments, prior authorizations, etc.  In a competitive industry built around complexity, there is a way to simplify it for the patient.   

Comments

[Steven M Hacker MD]

As a physician and founder of PassportMD, Inc. (http://www.PassportMD.com ) , I remain committed to creating a free site and service so that people of any age and any economic status can participate. The free service helps people through the often-tedious process of creating a very valuable, and potentially life saving tool, the personal health record. We are committed to simplifying this process, giving people, seniors, adults, children, particularly with a history of at least one chronic medical disease, on multiple medications, or with a history of allergies. Doctors need to have access to reliable information that is legible and accessible and PassportMD provides this needed function.
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The doctors are very slowly adopting electronic health records. This adoption is way too slow and is very complicated. It has many factors in play as it relates to the economics of medicine. Although privacy is considered an issue, the true issue is cost, implementation and maintanence costs to the physician practice are too burdensome in light of decreasing reimbursement. Thus, only 7.5 % of physician practices are currently adopting electronic health records. Though, if you poll the remaining 92.5% of physicians, probably all would agree that electronic health records are better for medicine and for the patient. Adoption is inevitable but the pace and time period for adoption is dependent upon many factors. You, the patient, and you, the consumer, should not have to wait for these forces to work themselves out. You can be proactive and you can start your own personal health record at no charge with PassportMD.com.

[Personal Health Records]

Good inforamtion on personal health records. which is really helpful