URSA-PHARM | Medication Synchronization

Overview

For patients one two or more chronic medications, synchronizing their refill schedule to reduce trips to the pharmacy has been found to improve adherence and subsequently health outcomes.
This report provides users with the tools they need to evaluate historical and act on current day opportunities to align refills for chronic medications by providing a worklist of patients by identifying the next date that refills could be synchronized.
This report also provides other intermediate process measures associated with adherence and synchronization such as use of 90-day fills and mail order pharmacies to reduce the number of trips a patient must make in a given month to get their chronic medications filled.

Use this report to

• Develop an understanding of medication synchronization.
• Analyze what percent of the population have chronic medications that could have their fills synchronized.
• Identify prescribers and generate patient action lists for synchronizing medications.
• Monitor performance across your population, prescribers, and medication classes.
• Understand the variation and adoption in use of 90-day fills, mail order pharmacies, and generics for chronic medications.

Potential takeaways

• Across patients with multiple active chronic medications, what is the average number of distinct days they will have to go to the pharmacy for a refill of a chronic medication each month?
• Which patients have multiple upcoming refill dates and are there patients with an above average number of upcoming refill dates?
• What percent of patients have their medications synchronized?
• Which patients have unsynchronized medications that are tracked for STARS PDC quality measures?
• For a given primary care provider, what is the list of patients that should be considered for medication synchronization?
• Who are the prescribers that would need to be coordinated with to synchronize a given patient's chronic medication refills?
• Are there other opportunities to improve adherence through reducing trips to the pharmacy by prescribing 90-day fills and/or use of mail order pharmacies?

Measures included in this report

• URSA-PHARM-R05: Patients with Chronic Medications
• URSA-PHARM-022: Distinct Refill Dates for Patients on 2+ Meds
• URSA-PHARM-023: Percent of Fills with Generic Medication
• URSA-PHARM-024: Percent of Chronic Med Fills for 90 Days Supply
• URSA-PHARM-025: Percent of Chronic Med Fills by Mail Order