Originally published by our sister publication Specialty Pharmacy Continuum
By Myles Starr
It takes a village for health systems to fully benefit from high-cost specialty medications, according to a new report from Vizient forecasting key healthcare system trends in 2025. 
To maximize the revenue from specialty pharmacy drugs—including cell and gene therapies that can cost more than $1 million per dose—pharmacy leaders need to “[enhance] patient access” and work “as a multidisciplinary team to identify systemwide efficiencies for these therapies,” the report noted.
The authors cited high-cost drug committees (HCDCs) as an example of this strength-in-numbers approach. These teams include physicians, pharmacists, nurses, pharmacy informatics specialists, supply chain managers, information technology architects, cybersecurity officers, finance teams, revenue cycle management experts, ethics advisors and social workers who help ensure treatment access, affordability and efficacy.
The rationale for such a large team is that the challenge of adopting advanced therapies is not a “pharmacy-only” endeavor, the report noted. Buy-in and resource allocation from leaders across a healthcare organization are needed to make the adoption of life-changing but high-ticket drugs an economic and clinical reality.
Nevertheless, pharmacy remains a key cog in these efforts. In the case of HCDCs, specialty pharmacists will need to act as stewards of cell and gene therapies, according to the report. This role includes knowing which patient populations are candidates for these medications, ensuring that all the processes for onboarding patients are conducted efficiently, managing the product (many of which have advanced requirements for transportation, storage and preparation), and tracking and monitoring both near- and long-term patient outcomes.
IT Infrastructure Another Key to Success
The overall theme of the Vizient report—"fueling success through pharmacy innovation”—is also evident in its recommendations in technology. Specifically, the report suggested that IT and analytics infrastructure play an important role in pharmacy innovation and the adoption of treatments administered by specialty pharmacies.
“Much of patient outcome information we would like to see is not currently collected as discrete elements, making efficient analysis that much harder,” explained Steven Lucio, PharmD, BCPS, the senior principal of pharmacy solutions at Vizient, in Irving, Texas. “If an organization is going to spend $500,000 or $1 million or $4.25 million to treat a patient, they need to understand if the patient received the maximum amount of benefit from that treatment.” As such, software-based tools to track patients’ long-term outcomes are a key part of making the case to use expensive new drugs, Dr. Lucio noted.
The goal of simultaneously fueling success through pharmacy innovation, boosting revenue and ensuring access to new therapies was described by Dr. Lucio as “difficult.” But he stressed that “it would be a tremendous loss if we make these significant investments in novel medications and patients cannot benefit from them.”
He added that the pharmacy profession is well positioned to champion these innovations “because it is a nexus point for both advancement in treatment and access to care.” On the one hand, he noted, “we continue to see the development of potentially life-changing medications. Conversely, there are very real economic challenges that threaten access to these treatments for many of the populations that need them the most.”