Providing Accessible Medication Amid The Data Chaos

By Dave Brunswick, vice president of solution, Cleo

With the creation of the 340B Drug Discount Program in 1992, the U.S government produced a new kind of marketplace, one designed to provide prescription medication to eligible healthcare organizations and their qualifying patients at significantly reduced prices. Proving to be a double-edged sword, for as much as the altruistic policy helped those in need, the underlying business processes essential to making the program a success grew complicated.

Over the course of more than two decades, the marketplace morphed into an increasingly complex healthcare ecosystem with countless hospitals, clinics, integrated delivery networks, wholesalers, pharmacies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers relying on the ever-increasing exchange of digital payloads chock-full of sensitive health, financial, and medical information. Such an intricate network involves innumerable daily file transfers, to and from multiple endpoints, across a variety of communications protocols and subject to an abundance of government and industry compliance mandates.

When The Business Grows, Business Technology Must Grow With It
Not only were electronic business exchanges expanding thanks to the 340B context, but businesses within health networks continued to grow, taking on more patients and trading partners — and thus, more data and protocols, such as SFTP and AS2. Further, some organizations participating in the 340B pricing program process millions of dispensations and claims, connecting to tens of thousands of healthcare providers and serving millions of patients. For them, an unintelligent and unintegrated file transfer solution can’t possibly keep up.

What used to “get the job done” became cumbersome and often proved unreliable. Traditional methods, like spinning up a homegrown FTP server (with a ton of custom scripting, of course) to send files and exchange orders outside the organization started tipping over, proving too slow or too code-heavy because of new volumes, security requirements, and the need to integrate with external, back-end, or downstream systems and applications.

Addressing The Challenges
Organizations participating in the 340B Drug Discount Program are simply trying to provide accessible and affordable medications amid all the data chaos. In doing so, they must strategically address three big challenges:

• Reducing the total cost of care: Many of these organizations are subsidized by government programs and must remain affordable.
• Managing compliance: To be eligible for the 340B discounts, facilities have to be able to track prescription distributions down to the individual pill level, and they need advanced metrics for accurate reordering.
• Producing better outcomes: Viewing a complete patient history and having the comprehensive version of a patient’s EHR in one place help deliver a decision matrix.

To solve these challenges in this type of digital marketplace, the ability to seamlessly do things like aggregate wholesale pricing data, manage inventory and price splits, aggregate patient data, and place and track orders is non-negotiable. The goal then is for healthcare organizations within the 340B program to seamlessly integrate all systems and data sources so they can run accurate reports, view the drug charges, and place drug orders. Further, organizations managing 340B transactions require better visibility into critical file transfers, multiple advanced protocols, improved security and encryption, and automated failover to maximize uptime and continuously serve patients through the continuous flow of data.

Fortunately, a niche group of innovative companies caught on that healthcare companies needed help in strategically and tactically adapting their foundational B2B infrastructures to face these challenges. The concept was simple — a single-platform solution to connect and integrate mission-critical information sources and operationalize the data required for a successfully realized 340B Drug Discount Program.

There are a number of solutions built on this advanced MFT and business-to-business integration (B2Bi) technology specifically designed to serve healthcare organizations and providers participating in the 340B Drug Discount Program, enabling a decrease in digital convolution, enhancing program compliance, offering valuable analytics outcomes, and improving revenue generation and cost management.

Integration as a Solution
With a single business integration platform built around managed file transfer (MFT) technology, connecting, securing, and governing all critical data flows will provide healthcare organizations with:

• Widespread protocol support to accommodate every hospital request from within a single technology investment.
• Real-time alerts on missing files for internal support teams but also for healthcare providers, who constantly strive to maintain numbers and program eligibility.
• Enhanced compliance with advanced encryption and easy audit capabilities.
• Reliable redundancy and automated failover protection for maximum uptime.

The optimal integration platform provides enhanced support for reliable data connectivity to deliver the analytics, procurement, drug utilization, and compliance requirements healthcare organizations need to optimize participation in the 340B pricing program. A next-generation MFT and B2Bi engine delivers the functionality to gain new business and simplifies mission-critical multi-format, multi-enterprise, and multi-application business processes.

This breed of agile integration solution provides incredible depth of data visibility to multiple user groups, including provider IT and healthcare teams and even patients, increasing the ease of managing file transfer processes, reducing risk, and providing superior customer service.

In adopting this next-generation integration engine, healthcare organizations can save time and money, automate workflows, and continue to engage the 340B ecosystem in a streamlined and highly efficient manner.

About The Author
Dave Brunswick is Cleo’s vice president of solutions. He has more than 25 years of experience in technology strategy, engineering, product management and product development. For more information, please visit www.cleo.com.