Empowered Patient Podcast Pharmacy Benefit Management Role in Making Medicines More Affordable and Accessible with Adam Kautzner Express Scripts
Adam Kautzner, President of Express Scripts, highlights the role pharmacy benefit management companies play in negotiating prices with drug companies and pharmacies. They also perform health safety checks to ensure patients get the correct medications and updates, and those with multi-morbidities are checked for possible drug interactions. Overcoming the supply chain challenges during the pandemic, Express Scripts continues to develop more effective solutions to lower the cost of drugs and improve access.
Adam explains, "Unfortunately, prescription drugs are becoming even more expensive. So our role in that space is to work for employers, or potentially for health plans, that hire us to help improve, for patients, medication affordability, to improve patient outcomes, and ensure that for patients there is predictability at the pharmacy counter to navigate their pharmacy benefit."
"We're able to do that because, as the most utilized benefit, we have a bird's eye view of all the different patients' needs that they may have. We're able to look over, if you're going to multiple doctors, getting prescribed multiple drugs from multiple doctors. We can actually perform safety checks across all of that to ensure that when you're refilling a prescription or getting a new prescription everything is safe, and there aren't going to be drug interactions. We're able to ensure that you have predictability and affordability for your pharmacy benefits."
"So yes, comorbidities continue to become a broader and broader issue. I would say there are also more drugs now to treat many of those comorbidities, and some products can even treat multiple types of conditions where they've been approved for things like cardiovascular and diabetes. Those drugs that treat multiple conditions can also be helpful as well because you can actually eliminate some drugs and minimize the number of different products that you have to take."
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