Cardinal Health's Naveen Mansukhani Details How Lowering Costs Is a Multi-Department Effort

Reducing costs falls on multiple health care departments, and the help of data, analytics, and specialty pharmacy strategies can ensure that cost reduction is successful, says Naveen Mansukhani, director of operations and account management of Retail Pharmacy Services at Cardinal Health.

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What strategies are health systems employing to combat the increasing costs of specialty drugs within their specialty pharmacy programs?

It's really about employing a collaborative approach. It's not just a pharmacy problem of controlling costs. It's also patient navigators, the pharmacy department, the billing department, ensuring that things are getting built properly before it's administered to a patient, where it ends up being a cost to the hospital.

How are health systems leveraging data and analytics to identify cost-saving opportunities and make informed decisions regarding specialty drug pricing and procurement?

This iswhere the importance of a specialty GPO [group purchasing organizations] comes into play. Specialty GPOs can help with these data analytics and ensure that the hospitals are buying the best possible drug at the least possible cost.

Are there any best practices or success stories of health system specialty pharmacy strategies that have effectively tackled the challenge of escalating specialty drug costs?

There's many hospitals that have employed strategies that, really from a retail perspective, of getting specialty drugs into the community. So, from hospital into community of ordering these drugs, and now they become a revenue to the hospital versus just simply a cost. That's where a specialty pharmacy strategy really makes sense, and where hospitals are finding success. It also helps with the patient end to end approach where the hospital is able to work with patients on the outside when they become outpatients. It improves compliance, It improves outcomes, and it controls overall health care costs.