Zyntrigues, Volume 1, Issue 8 - August 2008
Volume 1, Issue 8, -August 2008 |
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In this Issue
Musingsby Bob Pinkerton, COO, Zynchros I’d like to start this month with a resounding “Thank You” to everyone who participated in our application survey last month. Your input is invaluable to us and really helps us to separate the urgent from the important in planning future development activities. Tom Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence” said, “Excellence is attained by finding out what your customer considers value and giving it to them.” I certainly believe that is vital to our success and hope you feel we are listening and acting upon your suggestions and input. Many of you will have seen the announcement of our relationship with Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) and we are delighted to welcome ACS to the Zynchros family. Through this partnership, we will be brining the power of Zynchros.com to the Medicaid Market and, specifically, the state agencies responsible for implementing Medicaid programs at a local level. With the many complexities of these Medicaid programs, the communication of accurate Preferred Drug Lists (PDLs) to members, providers and the agency’s trading partners has become burdensome and expensive. We hope to provide state agencies with a solution set that greatly simplifies PDL management and administration and makes Medicaid benefits easier to understand for beneficiaries. This relationship is one more example of how we envision Zynchros.com bridging the information gaps in pharmacy benefits by connecting interested parties to key benefit information and synchronizing all constituents around a consistent and accurate PDL/Formulary/Benefit Design. As we enter the Part D marketing season, if you don’t have your house in order, it is not too late to get help. Zynchros is offering an integrated solution to produce customized printed formulary guides matched to the exact same data that drives our Member Formulary Hosting service. We can quickly demonstrate a labor-saving approach to ensuring formulary information is identical whether in print, on your member-facing web-sites or within internal support systems. Please contact your Zynchros account manager for more details, call us at 866.ZYNCHROS (866.996.2476) or e-mail info@zynchros.com. I hope you have all had a wonderful summer with friends and family and we look forward to being of service throughout the year. Warmest regards Bob |
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Working Behind the Scenesby David Smith, VP Product Management, Zynchros You've probably noticed that the rate of new functionality appearing in Zynchros.com has slowed down a little compared to our usual release cycle. That isn't to say our development team hasn't been busy -- in fact, we've grown the development team to respond to the dramatic increase in users of Zychros.com over the past few months. However, that same increase in users has a flipside: heavier load on the computational servers that support the Zynchros.com application. As a result we've lately been putting heavier focus on architectural improvements in the areas of performance, scalability, and additional hardware. Although this work usually doesn't translate into visible new features, you'll notice the effects in improved response times and continued reliable service, especially in busy periods. Every time there's a scheduled maintenance period without a corresponding version update, that's means we're making behind-the-scenes changes like these. Rest assured, we're still keeping close track of your requests for new functionality and we are busy with research and design on a jam-packed backlog of updates in preparation for a renewed focus in new features. We're already preparing updates for the Medicare Part D 2010 submissions based on some improvements suggested from users during the 2009 submission period, and so we can be better prepared for any surprises from CMS when the draft call letter and technical manuals are released. Further improvements in Commercial Plan Pro are also being designed, especially in the area of managing multiple related rule-based formularies. As always, we depend on your feedback to help us plan these updates. Let us know what areas you'd like us to focus on by contacting the Zynchros Customer Service Team, or me directly. David Smith |
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New Customer Case Study: Establishing the PBM Gold Standard
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Webcast August 26th: Accelerating Your e-Prescribing Initiatives
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Date: |
Tuesday, August 26th |
Time: |
8:30am - 9:30am Pacific Time |
Speakers: |
Tom Groom, SVP Business Development, RxHub, LLC & David Smith, VP Product Management, Zynchros, Inc. |
Pharmacy Services: A Holistic Approach for State Medicaid Agencies
by Steve Konsin, VP Business Development, ACS, Inc.
State Medicaid agencies are under tremendous pressure to maintain and, in most cases, expand services while watching their budgets shrink and demand rise. Pharmacy benefits, in particular, offer both a set of challenges and a singular opportunity for state agencies to exploit technology and services to arrest spiraling costs, increase patient knowledge and satisfaction while improving prescriber and pharmacy relations. It all starts with the preferred drug list (PDL); how it is created, managed and distributed.
The PDL starts with a large set of eligible drugs, born out of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1990 (OBRA90) which established the standard CMS manufacturer rebate. In order for states to earn additional rebate dollars they can establish a Preferred Drug List (PDL) allowing them to negotiate further with manufacturers to secure supplemental rebates on preferred drugs within a therapeutic class. While no drug is excluded, utilization is managed through the use of a prior authorization process. The complexity of the PDL’s rebate/preference matrix is then multiplied when overlaid with state defined plans that serve different programs or populations within the state. PDL communication is a difficult process; an incredible management and communications feat to inform all parties of every detail and their subsequent changes.
Proactively managing PDL compliance can provide a direct benefit to all parties involved in the delivery and consumption of pharmacy benefits. When a prescriber goes off the PDL, the pharmacy will reject the prescription and start the expensive (for all parties) calling loop. Patients are either delayed or denied their medication. Pharmacies and prescribers are now spending time and resources and, if unresolved between them, will then impact the state’s resources in managing the process to a satisfactory end. Combine paper-thin pharmacy margins, lower compensation rates for physicians handling Medicaid patients and a state budget already under stress and you have a system ready for a new way to manage and communicate drug benefits to all of their downstream constituents.
The unique combination of the Zynchros.com pharmacy quality management platform and ACS services will provide state Medicaid agencies with a holistic approach to their pharmacy services; starting with PDL management and distribution. Using Zynchros the pharmacy services group can create and publish their PDL. Once published, the PDL can then be exported to national prescribing networks such as RxHub/SureScripts and to physician reference applications like ePocrates; enabling and/or enhancing electronic prescribing initiatives. It can also be pushed via web services to public-facing websites to assist in educating the patients themselves on available drug therapies and fulfillment alternatives. By combining the Zynchros.com platform and services with the already established ACS services in benefits management, claim processing and call centers we are able to provide an end-to-end solution for any state Medicaid agency looking to enhance control over their pharmacy benefits and improve relations with providers, pharmacies and patients.
To find out more about this new product & service offering from ACS and Zynchros, please join us for an interactive webcast on September 25th. More details below or please visit http://www.zynchros.com/news-events/events.asp.
Webcast September 25th: Pharmacy Services: A Holistic Approach for State Medicaid Agencies; PDL Creation, Management and Distribution
State Medicaid programs are under pressure from all sides. Join us to find out how to proactively manage your pharmacy services in order to:
- Improve PDL compliance
- Improve Provider and Pharmacy Relations
- Increase patient knowledge and satisfaction
- Minimize costs for support services while enhancing the quality of service
Date: |
Thursday, September 25th |
Time: |
8:30am - 9:30am Pacific Time |
Speakers: |
Steve Konsin, VP Business Development, ACS, Inc. |
Our holistic, end-to-end approach starts with the PDL and delivers integrated systems and services for the creation, management and distribution of your PDL to all internal and external constituents. We will demonstrate the Zynchros.com platform for PDL creation and publishing to a number of outlets including national prescribing networks, physician reference applications and public websites. We will also discuss the advantages of integrating the Zynchros.com platform with ACS services including pharmacy benefits management, claims processing and call center support.
Tips and Tricks: Publishing a Formulary
by Scott Pillsbury, Director, Customer Service & IT
Do you have the need to supply other teams or colleagues with the latest “approved” formulary data? An easy way to accomplish this is by utilizing the “Formulary Publishing” feature of Zynchros.com
The “Formulary Publishing” feature allows you to take a snapshot of your current work-in-progress formulary, archive it, and then perform any number of predefined publishing events.
Let’s break that down into what it actually means:
“Taking a snapshot of your current work-in-progress formulary and archiving it.” During this process a read-only snapshot of your current formulary is recorded and added to the ‘Archive History’ list. Archived snapshots of your formulary found in this list are “read-only” and are not subject to any updates to the drug database or proxy list.
“Publishing Events” are a set of tasks that you define. These tasks will be processed against the formulary archive at a predetermined time. For example, you could create tasks so that on September 3 the following happens:
- Your Marketing Department receives an email containing a copy of your formulary that may be opened using Microsoft Excel ®
- Your IT department receives a an XML snapshot via FTP transmission for long-term archiving
- Your formulary is automatically uploaded to Zynchros’ Member Formulary Hosting Service ensuring current formulary data is available for your members to view via your corporate web site.
Let’s walk through a simple process of defining a publishing event that automatically send our formulary to our colleague, John Doe, so he may review it using Microsoft Excel®.
First click on the “Version” icon from the formulary list page
Next, on the “Work in Progress” line, click on the “Publish” button. This will automatically create an archive of your formulary for future reference. Remember, this read-only version of your formulary and is not subject to any future changes of your formulary.
From the “Formulary Publishing” page, enter the date that you wish publish events to take place. For this example, we’ll use the default value of today’s date. Then click on the “Confirm Publish” button.
When prompted, click on “OK” to confirm the Publishing.
Now that you have your configured your formulary to be published, you need to define “Publishing Events”. In our case, we need to define the task that will send an email to our colleague “John Doe” containing an Excel spreadsheet of the current “published” (aka: archived version) of the formulary.
To start defining the event, click on the “Refine” button.
The “Refine” button launches a page that displays all previously defined publishing events. If this is the first publishing event, then your only choice will be to “Add New Publish Event”, or to “Return” to the previous screen.
There are two possible ways to transmit your formulary from Zynchros.com. One way is to perform a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) transmission, the other is to send an email. In this example, we will use the email method. From the drop-down box, select “Email” and then click on “Add New Publish Event”
The next step is to complete the “Add New Email Publish Event” with the required data.
In this case we’ve entered our colleague’s email address, the email subject line, and a brief message. We’ve chosen an export style of “CSV”. CSV is the acronym for Comma Separated Values. This is a standard file format that may be opened using Microsoft Excel®. There are a variety of other export styles available as well, including HPMS, Snapshot (XML), RxHub, NCPDP, Gap Coverage, Free First Fill, Home Infusion, OTC, and Excluded Drugs (**Note: some of these exports are dependent upon the formulary plan year and/or your Zynchros.com subscription)
We’ve also chosen the “Compress File” option. This will compress the file (aka: zip) into a smaller file size making it easier to transmit.
Once the information is completed, click on the “Add New” button to save the new event.
On the next screen, you will see the new event added to the “Manage Your Publish Events”.
If you like, you may add another event by simply clicking on the “Add New Publish Event” button and repeating the process. You may add as many publishing events as you like.
It’s that simple! Now, when the publishing date arrives, all the predefined events will be executed.
If you have any requests for future installments of “Zynchros Tips and Tricks” please send them to scott.pillsbury@zynchros.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
Did You Miss a Webcast? Want to Share Information with a Colleague?
You know us – online, on-demand, 24/7 – well, that means you can get the information you need when you want it. Visit our website Resources page and download a webcast, whitepaper or data sheet. You can also read past issues of Zyntrigues, inspect sample reports and request a demonstration.