We sat down for a virtual face-to-face interview with Trellis Rx’s marketing director, Kathryn Edwards, to talk about how the organization has embraced the challenges COVID-19 has brought, and how its marketing team has shifted strategies and tactics to ensure health systems are armed with the tools they need to ensure better patient outcomes.
Trellis Rx is a leading specialty pharmacy services provider that partners with health systems to enhance the specialty medication experience for their patients.
Dominique (MERGE): What are the biggest challenges health systems are facing when it comes to specialty pharmacy during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Kathryn (Trellis Rx): Determining how to provide continuity of care for patients with chronic illnesses who require specialty medication therapies is one of the top challenges. Many patients struggle to afford and adhere to these complex, expensive drugs during “normal” times. The pandemic only exacerbated these challenges. People have lost jobs and subsequently their insurance — and some of those same people are high-risk patients who have reservations about leaving their homes.
For care team members at health systems, staying up to date on rapidly evolving patient care guidelines and drug supply chain challenges was another challenge when the pandemic began. As an example, for a while at the beginning, some drugs typically used to manage chronic conditions were identified as potential treatments for COVID-19, so there ended up being stockpiling issues. In these cases, our pharmacists worked around-the-clock to keep providers informed so they could identify appropriate alternative therapies to ensure patients stayed on track when needed.
Dominique (MERGE): Piggybacking off the last question, how is the Trellis Rx marketing team addressing these challenges?
Kathryn (Trellis Rx): From our marketing team’s perspective, we acted quickly to create a resource center for health system specialty pharmacies that made it easy for leaders and practitioners to access the latest information from trusted sources. This included patient care guidelines, drug shortage trackers, and financial assistance funds, as well as insights from our experts on how to navigate drug access challenges. With pharmacists working at health systems across the country, we had quickly compiled a wealth of best practices and resources we knew others would benefit from.
Patients, especially those who take specialty medications that suppress the immune system, had a lot of concerns and questions when the pandemic began. Our pharmacists reached out to patients to provide counseling and information, recommending interventions to their providers if needed. Our pharmacy liaisons worked with patients to arrange 90-day refills and home deliveries so they could stay home. They also helped patients who lost their jobs get enrolled in financial assistance programs so they could continue to afford their therapies. We believe our proactive approach was pivotal to ensuring continuity of care and keeping patients on vital therapies during a very uncertain time.
Dominique (MERGE): What sort of marketing strategies has Trellis Rx implemented to help specialty pharmacies within health systems better communicate with patients?
Kathryn (Trellis Rx): Trellis Rx embeds pharmacists and pharmacy liaisons on-site at our partner health systems where they work alongside other care team members to provide high-touch, personalized care. Typically, our team members meet with patients in-person during their appointments to provide personalized education and counseling. We still aim to do this whenever it is feasible and safe to, but our pharmacists have begun using telehealth technologies at some of our health system partners too. This allows us to offer an integrated care experience virtually for high-risk patients who can’t or prefer not to come into the health system - from which we’re seeing positive results.
On the patient engagement side, we’re trying to meet patients where they are — that comes with implementing new technologies and methods that cater toward their needs. Our on-site pharmacists and pharmacy liaisons always reach out to patients between appointments to provide counseling, arrange refills, ensure adherence, monitor outcomes, and more. Before the pandemic though, this typically occurred telephonically. Now we’ve also implemented HIPAA-compliant email and texting functionality in our proprietary software, ArborTM.
Each of these channels — in-person, telehealth, phone, email, text — have played a role in allowing us to ensure continued, proactive engagement, which has been vital during the pandemic. Our pharmacists and pharmacy liaisons have unparalleled communication and relationships with patients, which ultimately helps ensure they start and stay on their therapies and achieve their best health during this crisis.
Forging ahead in the new normal
Like most other industries, healthcare has seen dramatic operational transformation. By overcoming the challenges associated with COVID-19, and building upon its existing platform to meet patients where they are during the pandemic, Trellis Rx and its health system partners are forging ahead and setting the example for what may become the future of healthcare.