Aspen RxHealth is an on-demand community of more than 4,000 clinical pharmacists that are intelligently matched to health plan members to improve health outcomes and quality measures. Below is our recent interview with Clayton Walberg, Chief Commercial Officer at Aspen RxHealth:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Aspen RxHealth?
A:Think Uber + Match.com – replace drivers with pharmacists and riders with patients.
When members require clinical services, a pharmacist is matched to them based on key social and clinical markers such as disease state, medication regimen, language, geographic relevance, and other consumer indicators. A predetermined engagement is then activated to drive health outcomes. In some cases, we may provide a single service, such as Comprehensive Medication Reviews in support of Medicare guidelines and Star measures. In others, we may build a long term relationship from our match assisting a patient longitudinally; e.g. assisting HIV patients in medication management and adherence.
The on-demand, flexible nature of our pharmacist community allows us to develop unique engagement strategies specific to each client and adapt effortlessly to their changing needs.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your product?
A: Our app-based technology is the key to delivering world class clinical services. We approach our product strategy through three key areas: patient experience, pharmacist experience; and enabling tech, data and outcomes improvement.
For our patients, via our crowd-sourcing approach, we have created a highly diverse community of clinical pharmacists operating in a gig-economy model. This diversity drives our pharmacist to patient matching improving member satisfaction and outcomes.
For example, our pharmacist community,
- Speaks 15+ languages.
- Resides in all 50 states.
- Provides more than 25 clinical pharmacist specialties and accreditations.
- Delivers diversity with multiple ethnicities, age bands and 50/50 gender representation in the community.
- Allows patients to choose “my pharmacist” creating a longitudinal relationship with their preferred pharmacist.
- Captures user ratings on their experience with our pharmacists.
- Support members’ specific engagements that drive the most relevant engagement between members and the pharmacist.
By matching members with the most applicable pharmacist, we drive improved experience and outcomes for our client’s members. For our pharmacists, we provide community and options that include working from anywhere and practicing at the top of the license. This provides a level of professional satisfaction and opportunity not readily available in the market. Aspen pharmacists can dedicate time to carefully analyze a patient’s treatment plan, assess potential medication interactions and develop engaged, holistic and positive relationships — on their schedule, where they want, freed from the time-consuming task of dispensing medications. In the background, our technology seamlessly identifies and connects them to patients in need of their specific area of interest or training, allowing clinical practice at the top of their license and training.
Founded by pharmacists with deep experience in clinical pharmacy data, our approach to data, analytics and outcomes has been approached with clinical rigor. For example, our advanced clinical decision support engine identifies and matches the most relevant patient care interventions, to the specific social and clinical attributes patients need and provides the ability to “surge” the network to respond to near-term risk or time-sensitive populations (I.e. COVID susceptible education) and provide real-time engagement analytics and network capacity feedback.
Q: Can you tell us something more about work opportunities for pharmacists?
A: The need to improve medication adherence, reduce errors and improve chronic care management rise every year. Increased medication options, greater complexities and escalating costs account for hundreds of billions of healthcare spend. While brick and mortar pharmacies have made significant strides, the growing trend of mail order delivery and virtualized services highlights the need to deliver clinical pharmacy in a more personalized way. Aspen RxHealth allows our pharmacist to operate at the peak of their license and exercise their years of clinical training.
Medication Therapeutic Management (MTM), care transition gaps, and specialty medication support increasingly require an on-demand, personalized model. These factors elevate the role of the pharmacist and require more patient-centric connections focused on optimizing the use of medications. The pharmacists in the Aspen RxHealth community are enabled to do just this, while empowering patients with action plans and the education to drive profound impact on outcomes.
All while, working from anywhere, with flexible hours, and creating a secondary or primary income source.
Q: What can we expect from Aspen RxHealth in next 12 months?
A: Within the last few months, our pharmacy community has expanded to support all 50 states. National expansion in support of our health plan clients is next. We’ve also devoted time to deepen our technologies to managing discrete quality measures (Star, HEDIS) and support longitudinal interventions focused on drug spend, chronic conditions and high risk segments such as diabetes, cardiac, HIV, etc. Expect to see increased engagements in the Medicaid populations where many of the most socially vulnerable struggle with health literacy and day to day medication management.