Improving the Patient Experience in Receiving Specialty Medications

Challenge Description

In the United States, some medications have a specialized fulfillment process which can be challenging for patients to navigate. Specifically, biologic medicines are dispensed by specialty pharmacies that deliver by mail-order only, ensuring the medication is appropriately stored and refrigerated throughout the delivery process. 

As a patient, working with a remote specialty pharmacy can be less transparent than a neighborhood-based retail pharmacy. Examples of this include patients not knowing: which specialty pharmacy their insurance authorizes to deliver their medication, when it will be delivered, or how to easily reach the specialty pharmacy for updates or to make changes to the scheduled deliveries.

The goal of this challenge is to simplify the filling of biologic prescriptions for patients in order to improve access to medicines. The proposed solution should:

• Track the journey of a biologic prescription and provide status updates to patients on demand
• Be patient friendly, i.e., usable format, easy accessibility, respects patient privacy
• Offer a business rationale for specialty pharmacies to participate and share data

This solution should be implementable across all specialty pharmacies. The “challenge guidelines” and “additional context” pages describe in more detail the specific steps of the prescription journey that should be covered, along with context on biologic medicines and how the prescription system works currently in the US. Ultimately, by creating more transparency about biologic medicines and prescription status, we hope to help more patients receive the medications they need, when they need them. 

This challenge is a call for ideas, and subsequent challenges may build out the technical, regulatory, and economic considerations in more detail for the winning solution.