We recently announced the launch of Pharmacy Data, allowing healthcare professionals using our Patient360 solution to retrieve pharmacy data seamlessly from most major pharmacies. This represents significant progress in bringing together a more complete view of a patient’s health in ambulatory care settings.

Users of Health Gorilla’s interoperability platform can receive access to complete medication history for panels of patients, such as those with diabetes or other chronic conditions, including prescription fill, refill, renewal, and prescriber and pharmacy NPI for treatment purposes. Through an SFTP process, medication history will be queried, returned, deduplicated and presented within Patient360, enabling streamlined workflows and operational efficiency for ambulatory providers seeking to manage medications across a patient population.

These unique data types will give healthcare providers a more complete understanding of their patients' medication use and will help to reduce medication errors, one of the most common causes of preventable harm in healthcare.

The integration of pharmacy data also allows healthcare providers to more easily identify potential drug interactions and other issues related to medication use – ultimately helping to improve the quality of patient care and reduce the risk of adverse events.

“We are excited to expand the types of data that we can provide to our customers,” says Steve Yaskin, CEO and Co-founder of Health Gorilla. “By integrating pharmacy data into our Patient360 platform, we can help healthcare providers to make more informed decisions about their patients' care, and ultimately improve outcomes.”

Medication data plays a vital role in the healthcare industry, as it helps to inform the decisions of healthcare providers and improve the overall quality of care for patients.

One of the top use-cases for pharmacy data is to track the prescribing and dispensing of medications. This information can help healthcare providers to identify patterns in medication use, such as which medications are most commonly prescribed for certain conditions, and which patients may be at risk of medication-related adverse events. This information can then be used to inform prescribing guidelines, improve medication safety, and identify potential drug interactions.

A lack of adherence causes nearly 125,000 deaths, is responsible for 10 percent of hospitalizations, and costs the healthcare system between $100-$289 billion each year, according to estimates by the Annals of Internal Medicine. Up to 30 percent of new prescriptions are abandoned, which can be attributed to high out-of-pocket costs, concerns about side effects, and procrastination, according to the FDA.

Another core use-case is drug utilization review. This process involves analyzing the data on the medications that patients are taking, in order to identify any potential issues or problems. For example, a drug utilization review might identify patients who are taking multiple medications that interact with each other, or patients who are taking medications that are not appropriate for their condition.

According to the CDC, adverse drug events cause approximately 1.3 million emergency department visits each year. Further, about 350,000 patients each year need to be readmitted to the hospital after emergency visits for adverse drug events. And because people typically take more medicines as they age, the risk of adverse events also increases.

Medication reconciliation, an essential tool for preventing adverse drug events, is another use case vital to protecting patients from harm. This means creating an accurate list of all medications, including dosage and frequency, to ensure safe treatment across the care continuum. 

Overall, pharmacy data plays a crucial role in informing decisions, improving safety, and increasing the efficiency of the healthcare system. With the continued growth of EHRs and other digital health technologies, it is likely that the use of pharmacy data will continue to expand in the future.

“With clinical and pharmacy data in one place, care teams can close care gaps for good,” Yaskin said in a recent press release about the launch of pharmacy data. 

To learn more, sign up for Health Gorilla’s upcoming webinar “Improving Care with Complete Medication Data” on February 23 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific. Click here to register. To learn more about our pharmacy data solution, visit healthgorilla.com/home/pharmacy.