Moorestown, NJ, and Philadelphia, PA, (February 1, 2016) – Tabula Rasa HealthCare (TRCH), a healthcare technology company that is a leader in providing patient-specific, data-driven technology and solutions for health care organizations, and The Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH), an employer organization focused on healthcare benefits best practices, have entered into a collaboration to underscore the importance to employers of workforce medication safety.
The joint undertaking will commence with TRHC’s examination of medication risk in a defined subset of employees in one of GPBCH’s self-funded employer members. The objective of the review is to study the extent of medication risk in a diverse workforce population and the opportunities to mitigate that risk – all for the benefit of improving the health and welfare of employees and reducing unnecessary healthcare costs.
The study will utilize TRCH’s proprietary Medication Risk Mitigation platform known as MedWise Advisor®, a proprietary tool that examines medication regimens and various extrinsic and intrinsic medication safety factors.
With 4.3 billion prescriptions filled in the United States in 2014, medication treatment is the most common medical intervention. Its imprecise use represents the fourth leading cause of death and contributes to an estimated 45-50 million adverse drug events (ADEs) annually. In the United States, ADEs account for about 3.5 million physician visits, about 1 million emergency room visits, and about 280,000 hospital admissions each year. ADEs also prolong hospital stays by 1.7-4.6 days and result in about $3.5 billion of United States healthcare costs on a yearly basis.
“Clearly, having the ability to mitigate the risk of ADEs has a direct and significant bottom-line impact on health outcomes and the cost of healthcare for employers and those they employ,” said Neil Goldfarb, GPBCH’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
The study is being conducted to demonstrate the applicability of TRHC’s methodology to population-level data. “Working with GPBCH, we are looking to highlight medication risks that exist in a workforce population and project how various interventions could improve productivity, wellness and costs,” said Tabula Rasa HealthCare CEO Calvin H. Knowlton, BScPharm, MDiv, PhD.
The parties expect this study will result in identifying the various kinds of medication risk found in the member employee population and the scope and extent of these risks. This data may then result in further discussions concerning appropriate, personalized interventions to mitigate medication risk. It is anticipated the initial analysis will be completed in mid-2016.
About The Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health
Established in 2012, the Greater Philadelphia Business Coalition on Health (GPBCH) is a membership organization open to any employer that is corporately based or that has a significant employed population in a service area including the Philadelphia five-county region, the State of Delaware, and southern New Jersey. GPBCH has 45 employer members representing 750,000 covered lives locally, and nearly 1.5 million lives nationally. The Coalition also offers affiliate memberships to organizations that do not participate as employers but have an interest in supporting GPBCH’s mission.
GPBCH’s mission is to represent the employer community in working with health plans, health care providers, and other system stakeholders to improve the value of health benefit spending for members, by improving health care quality and safety and reducing health care costs.
GPBCH is one of more than 50 business coalitions that collaborate through the National Business Coalition on Health to influence national policy and to learn from each other about best practices.
Contact
Neil Goldfarb
ngoldfarb@gpbch.org
T: 215-731-2472