Humana, Epic Team to Display Drug Costs in EHR

Collaboration to Provide Better Data, Insights, and Experience for Patients and Providers at Point-of-Care

Humana Inc, a leading health and well-being company, and Epic, the most widely used comprehensive health record system, recently announced an agreement that will integrate technologies to enhance patient, provider, and payer access to health information. Humana is the first national health care insurer to collaborate with Epic to bring together patients, providers, and payers to power value-based care.

Humana and Epic are advancing interoperability to promote open communication and information transparency that will give patients and their practitioners integrated and real-time access to the patients’ medical history, health insights, and treatment options, which, in turn, enables cost reduction, improves quality, and increases patient satisfaction.

“The nexus of these technologies will both improve the provider experience and patient access to care by empowering them to weigh evidence-based outcomes with patients’ individual medication cost and coverage,” says Alan Wheatley, president of Humana’s retail segment. “It’s estimated that roughly half of Humana Medicare Advantage members already see a doctor who uses Epic’s platform, so we are excited about the significant number of patients that will benefit from this partnership.”

To enhance the prescribers experience, Humana will integrate its Real-Time Benefits Check tool, IntelligentRx , directly into Epic’s ePrescribing workflow, delivering real-time pharmacy data throughout its network.

“The integration of IntelligentRx’s decision-making platform with Epic’s product empowers physicians and their patients to make treatment decisions together, based on efficacy and cost transparency. When prescribers use IntelligentRx and they are presented with alternatives, we find that they select the more cost effective treatment nearly 40% of the time,” says Scott Greenwell, president of Humana Pharmacy Solutions.

Integrating these technologies will improve the timeliness and accuracy of Humana-generated knowledge, ease administrative burden, and help providers make the best decisions for patients at the point-of-care through the delivery of timely, meaningful member insights. The model should do the following:

• increase the breadth, quality, and timeliness of data exchange to better track quality measures and improve the breadth of member insights;
• reduce cost and improve the extent of specialty care by surfacing quality and cost information to providers as they make referral decisions at the point-of-care;
• improve medication adherence by presenting medication alternatives with cost information to providers while they prescribe;
• improve provider access to claims to support monitoring of value‐based arrangement performance; and
• reduce burden on providers and improve timeliness for prior authorization decisions.

“This transformative relationship brings together the provider, the payer, and the patient in new ways so they’re all working from the same playbook,” says Alan Hutchison, vice president of population health at Epic. “The relationship is also about aligning information to reduce the administrative burden on providers and improve quality and transparency for patients.”

— Source: Humana