What You Should Know:
– Shields Health Solutions and Excelera announce a major specialty pharmacy merger that will form a combined company that consults with 700+ hospitals in 43 states, including Mass General Brigham, Yale New Haven, Intermountain Healthcare and Henry Ford.
– The network of hospitals is designed to improve patient care through an infrastructure that helps with things like acquiring prior authorization for specialty drugs and staying adherent to them. It can also lower costs for patients by negotiating lower rates from manufacturers with the leverage of insights from 1 million+ patients in those hospitals.
Shields Health Solutions (Shields), the leading health system specialty pharmacy integrator, has joined forces with ExceleraRx Corp. (Excelera), a healthcare company that empowers integrated delivery networks, health systems, and academic medical centers to provide personalized, integrated care for patients with complex and chronic conditions focused on improving patient care.
Merger Reflects Growing Need for On-Site, Integrated Specialty Pharmacies
Serving 60+ health systems and academic medical centers, the combined organization addresses 700+ hospitals that account for the opportunity of $30B in specialty pharmacy revenue. The use of specialty medications to treat complex patients – those with multiple, chronic illnesses or rare, hard to treat diseases that require close monitoring and support – is increasing an average of 17 percent per year, and health systems across the U.S. have been building on-site, integrated specialty pharmacies to provide comprehensive, streamlined care for this growing population to improve outcomes. Since 2015, the prevalence of health system-owned specialty pharmacies in large hospitals has doubled, with nearly 90 percent of large hospitals operating a specialty pharmacy in 2019.
“On-site, integrated specialty pharmacy is the future of complex patient care and we look forward to combining forces with Excelera to make our impact even greater. As we have shown, this model materially improves clinical outcomes for patients and reduces total medical expenses for covered patients,” said Lee Cooper, CEO, Shields. “Together, our network of more than 60 of the country’s top health systems, representing nearly 30% of non-profit healthcare systems based on net patient service revenues, creates an unparalleled industry-first that will enable unprecedented best practice sharing and ultimately lead to improved outcomes for complex patients.”
Benefits of On-Site, Integrated Specialty Pharmacies for Health Systems
Shields and Excelera offer programs for health systems to build, operationalize and optimize integrated specialty pharmacies, as well as help manufacturers and payors access critical patient and drug performance insights. With a more personalized, high-touch approach to patient care, Shields and Excelera have found that hospital-owned specialty pharmacies dramatically simplify medication and care management for patients and can:
– Reduce medication co-payments from hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to an average co-pay of $10
– Streamline time-to-therapy, typically from several weeks to an average of two days
– Decrease physician administrative paperwork by thousands of hours
– Improve medication adherence rates to over 90 percent, on average.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
