Specialty Medication Prescribing (PSS in Confluence)

By 2020, a projected 9 out of 10 top selling-drugs by revenue will be Specialty. Examples of specialty medication categories include Oncology, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Infusion drugs, etc. The current process for exchanging data, including prescription data regarding specialty medications is complex and manual, taking days to weeks to begin a patient on therapy. There is no industry standard for exchanging clinical data when necessary for dispensing specialty medications by pharmacies as well as facilitating enrollment of patient in programs offered by third parties such as Hub vendors or Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. NCPDP started a task group several years ago focused on the exchange of data needed to help shorten the time to therapy for a patient who has been prescribed a specialty medication and over the past two years have been focused on identifying demographic, clinical and financial information that needs to be exchanged in order to get the patient the therapy they need. This information is outside of the current e-Prescription that is sent to the pharmacy today. After an extensive analysis of the types of additional information that is required along with the prescription it was determined that developing an implementation guide using HL7 FHIR would be the best approach to support the exchange of this information.