Strategic Initiative to Create Greater Transparency and Access

Fragmentation in the health care system creates challenges for care coordination and is a barrier to improving health outcomes. Electronic health records (EHRs) are a great step forward in helping bring down some of those barriers and ensuring health care providers have more comprehensive access to patient records and information.

Innovations in technology, streamlined data sharing, and greater communication and connectivity between patients and all their health care providers — physicians, pharmacy and insurers — can help create a truly seamless system that offers greater transparency and access.

CVS Health and Epic today announced a strategic initiative to help lower drug costs for patients and improve outcomes by providing prescribers with expanded visibility to lower cost alternatives through enhanced analytics and data sharing. CVS Health will use Epic’s Healthy Planet population health and analytics platform to generate insights about prescriber dispensing patterns and patient behavior around medication adherence. Epic’s EHR system is already used to support the nurse practitioners of MinuteClinic and is being incorporated into CVS Specialty care management programs.

New Frontiers of Data Integration

Interoperability allows millions of records to be exchanged daily with tens of thousands of organizations through various national and regional networks, including hospitals, clinics and other health care providers. At CVS Health, we continue to explore, identify and develop projects to expand interoperability, improve connectivity, and advance the leading edge of technology innovation beyond the pharmacy to the entire health care system. Doing so can help truly change the delivery of care in the future and bolster prescription decision-making for patients and their care teams, including physicians, pharmacists and health insurers. The new initiative with Epic is another step in this direction.

Areas covered by the EPIC collaboration include:

	Prescription Drug Cost Savings Enable real-time benefit information sharing and facilitated, point-of-prescribing electronic prior authorization (ePA) to help share information about covered drugs that are clinically effective and available at the lowest out-of-pocket cost for the patient.
	Improved Prescribing Decisions Development of a comprehensive clinical database to enhance medication counseling and help optimize medication selection for CVS Health patients.
	Shared Care Plan for Pharmacists Improve pharmacist access to clinical information and allow contribution to the care plan to improve continuity of care.
	Digital Front Store Capabilities Creation of a digital front store to include over-the-counter medication and durable medical equipment purchases into the patient’s EHR.

Interoperability at CVS Health

Interoperability within the health care system means ease of use for providers and patients, and greater access and transparency for all stakeholders. CVS Health has been a driving force behind creating a connected clinical experience for all providers across our enterprise.

Interoperability improves the delivery of healthcare by making the right data available at the right time to the right people, provides continuity of care across multiple providers and platforms, improves quality and safety of patient care by reducing medical errors, and provides clinical decision support for more effective care and treatment.

Building Upon the Foundation

CVS Health’s unique position and many touchpoints in patients, members and consumers’ health care journey can help to create powerful connectivity and greater integration, in addition to the real-time interventions already enabled by our pharmacy claims.

Pharmacy claims provide information about clinical indication and prescribed therapy and dosage. Combined with a member’s prescription history, this enables real-time interventions to optimize pharmacy treatment and help lower overall health care costs. Medical claims lag an actual visit by days or even weeks, and while they add incremental value, do not provide the rich clinical information included in EHRs, such as test results, lab data, diagnoses, and physician and nurse insights. Our goal is to look for ways to enable prescribers to have visibility to both a patient’s prescription history information with the rich clinical data in EHRs at the point-of-prescribing.