Empowered Patient Podcast Specialty Pharmacies Altering Rare Disease Care with Kerry Mello-Parker Shields Health
Kerry Mello-Parker, Director of Rare Diseases and REMS programs at Shields Health Solutions, addresses the complexities and challenges faced by patients with rare diseases including diagnostic delays and limited access to medication. Using an integrated specialty pharmacy model, Shields works with pharmacists to have direct access to the EHR, enabling better patient monitoring, shorter time to initiate medication, tracking outcomes, and providing patients with a direct line of communication to their care team. Pharmacists treating rare diseases are also supported with specialized information on medication administration, side effects and complex billing.
Kerry explains, "Shields Health Solutions is a specialty pharmacy accelerator. We partner with over 80 health systems across the United States. We support them in establishing and growing a specialty pharmacy. We help them to access critical medications. Some of them are not available at traditional pharmacies, and we support them in managing clinical quality care programs for their patients."
"I'd like to step back a little and talk about what a rare disease is and how we define it. Currently, it is defined as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people. However, over 7,000 rare diseases exist. So when we do the math, we come to see that they are not so rare. And some estimates show that up to 10% of the US population may actually have a rare disease. And what I've seen is that there are really three main complexities of treating rare diseases and challenges that patients may face. One of them is that there is a lack of available treatment options when compared with more common diseases. So, for example, only about 10% of rare diseases have an FDA-approved treatment option, but that is changing. We have the Orphan Drug Act, which has actually changed the landscape. It has incentivized and facilitated the development of medications to treat rare diseases."
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