Zynchros

In this Issue

• Musings, by Bob Pinkerton
• Zynchros Special Interest Groups (ZSIG)
  
• Data Intelligence for the Intelligent Partnership, by Tara Burkhart of Medi-Span
• Creating Formularies for Targeted Market Segments with Medi-Span and Zynchros Webcast, July 24th
• Using Medi-Span's GPI Criteria in Rules, by David Smith
• Last Chance—Two-for-One Formulary Hosting
• Tips and Tricks: Configuring IE to Stop Prompting for Downloads, by Scott Pillsbury
• Zynchros Online Resources

Musings

by Bob Pinkerton, COO

This month, I’d like to thank all of you who responded to the formation of our Special Interest Groups expressing your interest in helping us shape a better Zynchros.com. Whenever you start something new like this, it is not obvious what kind of response you are going to get but, suffice to say, we were delighted by the receptivity to the idea and the willingness to get involved. We are very excited at the potential of these groups to help us re-shape some of the issues in pharmacy that never seem to get addressed because, “it’s always been that way.” Without trying to mirror any of our presidential candidates, it does feel like change is in the air.

We’ve also been delighted by the response to our new Member Formulary Hosting service and are busy working away on the first of many implementations. As we have entered so many conversations around the hosting, and member communications in general, we have been amazed at the creativity of some of the member retention, communication and education programs that are out there, and the potential to use our new service to support and implement those programs.

We have built the Zynchros.com platform around Microsoft’s Knowledge Driven Health (KDH) initiative and are implementing many of the architectural constructs from that strategy in the solution set. We want to present our customers with a technology that supports and encourages Member-driven health care by empowering your members to educate themselves and take advantage of the best possible treatments and programs available.

With the broader adoption of Personal Health Records we are investigating ways to integrate formulary information with the various PHR solutions including Microsoft’s HealthVault and others. I’d be fascinated to hear from you as to what PHR/HER solutions you are looking at, what kind of capabilities you think will make these solutions “sticky” to your members and how you think Zynchros should play a part. Please feel free to e-mail me at robert.pinkerton@zynchros.com and let me know your thoughts.

Until next time, I wish you and yours an enjoyable and relaxing summer.

Bob

Zynchros Special Interest Groups (ZSIGs)

We want to thank all of you that applied for positions in our newly formed ZSIGs.  Each group’s roster has been finalized and on July 7th members will receive the date, time and agenda for the first meeting.  We are grateful and honored by your willingness to give your time and expertise to our endeavor and hope that you will enjoy and benefit from the exchange of ideas with Zynchros and your colleagues.

If you have any questions, please contact Terry Christiani at 206-792-4106 or terry.christiani@zynchros.com.

Data Intelligence for the Intelligent Partnership

by Tara Burkhart, Wolters Kluwer Health - Medi-Span®

GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.  It may seem trite but this old adage is true; and while this statement is tremendously oversimplified, the data powering your software solutions plays a significant role in the delivery of the results you need. The data must be accurate and of the highest quality as well as intelligent to maximize your return on investment.

Wolters Kluwer Health - Medi-Span’s® 30-plus years of experience are demonstrated by our commitment to and success in providing content of the highest quality and integrity. Our company name may have changed over the years but our core competence has remained constant. Our content and tools continue to be managed by clinical and technical experts and validated by a series of stringent quality assurance measures. Intelligence and integrity are the cornerstones of the Medi-Span business and we are proud to work closely with Zynchros in support of their current pharmacy quality management platform and service modules.

Zynchros.com relies upon our Master Drug Data Base or MDDB® to ensure that you are getting the right results when you need them. MDDB is the flagship drug file offering from Medi-Span and provides information on more than 160,000 NDCs and includes more than 100 different informational attributes for each one.

MDDB contains and is anchored by Medi-Span’s proprietary Therapeutic Classification System (TCS) built around Medi-Span’s Generic Product Identifier or GPI.  The GPI is an intelligent drug identifier that provides an efficient and intuitive mechanism for drug classification.  Embraced by the marketplace for more than 2 decades, the GPI defines a group of pharmaceutically equivalent products as broadly as a drug group (e.g., Anti-Infective Agents) and as specific as a drug, its strength and unit of measure (e.g., Atorvastatin Calcium Tablet 20 MG).  No random codes here!  This intelligence, the GPI and TCS, embedded into the data, provide a powerful hook for incredibly tight integration. The Zynchros.com platform takes full advantage of the MDDB data intelligence in order to deliver a smarter, more powerful solution for your pharmacy quality management efforts.

Creating Formularies for Targeted Market Segments with Medi-Span and Zynchros

Register Now

The formulary is the heart of any drug benefit strategy, and in today’s competitive marketplace formularies targeted to specific populations are essential for creating differentiated health plan products.  To structure the benefit to appeal to these populations, you need the right drug information and the ability to use it to define appropriate brand/generic designations, tiers and utilization management. In this webcast presentation, Tara Burkhart (Marketing Manager, Medi-Span) will describe the unique features of the drug information in Medi-Span’s MDDB drug database that make this possible, while David Smith (VP Product Management, Zynchros) describes how the powerful rules-based formulary management system in Zynchros Commercial Plan Pro enables clinical pharmacists to create, manage, and distribute these formularies throughout the organization.

Register Now

Using Medi-Span's GPI Criteria in Rules

By David Smith, Vice President Product Management

As Tara Burkhart explains in her article in this month’s Zyntrigues, the Medi-Span GPI is a powerful and flexible classification system. Within the Zynchros Commercial Plan Pro (CPP) module, we employ the GPI to provide you time-saving and error-eliminating features such as; selecting a wide or narrow segment of the drug universe, according to your desired formulary structure.

For example, a 14-digit GPI represents one particular dosage form and strength of a drug (and all pharmaceutical equivalents). And because the GPI is a hierarchical numbering scheme, you can remove pairs of digits from the end of the GPI to broaden your search to all strengths, all dosage forms, or even all drugs within a given class or subclass. For example:

You can exploit the hierarchical nature of the GPI in CPP by using a wild-card (*) in building your rule criteria. For example, a criterion such as this:

GPI = 4155002100*

will return all formulations of Clarinex in the database. This makes a list of 12-digit GPI’s the perfect tool for creating preferred drug lists in your rules-based formularies.

The GPI is also a great tool for identifying classes of drugs that are otherwise hard to isolate, such as ED or smoking cessation drugs.  We provide a number of examples for your use in the Zynchros Library, which is easily accessible by clicking the Copy Rule From… button in the Rules Editor.

Medi-Span MDDB subscribers can find more information about GPI in Section 2-5 of the MDDB 2.5 manual, and a complete list of partial-GPI classifications can be found in the file M25TCRF. We also plan to add the capability to browse all GPI classifications from this file in a future update to Zynchros.com.

As always please feel free to contact me with any questions at your convenience at david.smith@zynchros.com or 206-792-4108.

Last Chance—Two-for-One Formulary Hosting

Sign up by June 30th for formulary hosting and get two formularies for the price of one!  The Zynchros Member Formulary Hosting service delivers a web services client and controls to you for deployment within your existing member-facing website.  Now you can deliver accurate and timely information to your members with intuitive query and response displays that are fully customizable to reinforce your brand and focus your members on the information most relevant to the formulary and their medication.

No more static documents!  Automated updates for your published formulary data!  Meets CMS requirements!  Contact us today to discuss your formulary hosting needs at 866-996-2476, option 1.

Tips and Tricks: Configuring IE to Stop Prompting for Downloads

By Scott Pillsbury, Director, Customer Service and IT

Are you ever annoyed by this message from IE?

As a security measure, Microsoft Internet Explorer® blocks files from being automatically downloaded to your computer. You may notice this when you try to export a file from Zynchros.com.

A simple solution to avoid this process is to “enable” automatic prompting for downloads. The trick is to not just enable this for any internet site, but only the sites you trust, like Zynchros.com.

The first step, is to identify Zynchros.com as a “Trusted Site”. This can be done within Internet Explorer’s “Internet Options”. The following was performed using Internet Explorer V7.0.

From the “Internet Options” select the “Security Tab” and follow these simple steps:

1. Select the “Trusted Sites” Zone.
2. Click on the “Sites” button.
3. Add https://secure.zynchros.com to the list of websites
4. Click on “Close” to go back to the “Internet Options” page

Next, we will enable the automatic prompting for downloads. To do this, simply click on the “Custom Level…” button on the “Internet Options” page. This will open the “Security Settings” page. From here, we will modify the security settings for your list of Trusted Sites only. These settings will only apply to websites you have added to the “Trusted Sites” Zone.

1. Scroll down until you see “Automatic prompting for file downloads”. Depending on your version of Internet Explorer, this is usually about half way down. Once you find this, click on “Enable” to activate this feature.
2. Click on “OK” to save the setting
3. At the “Warning!” prompt, select “Yes” to change the settings for this zone.
4. Then click on “OK” to close the “Internet Options” window

Once you have performed these simple steps, you should now be able to easily download your formulary exports from Zynchros.com

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.