Checklist: 5 Points to Evaluate Your Pharmacy Tech Vendor

If your pharmacy organization is like most others, you’re continually increasing your investment in technology and automation. It’s the only way to serve patient needs in the face of ever-changing regulation and today’s evolving marketplace.

To make the most of your investment, your long-term plan should include technology partners that can support your needs today, and tomorrow. When evaluating your pharmacy tech vendors, it’s important to consider capabilities including robust cybersecurity, advanced data and analytics, support for regulatory compliance, therapeutic coverage, virtual pharmacy solutions and central filling services.

Beyond the solutions and technology, you should also take into account the human insight and support that your vendors offer. There’s a lot to consider, but we’ve identified five key criteria to help you evaluate your pharmacy tech vendors.

1. Adherence to Cybersecurity Best Practices

Vetting your vendors’ cybersecurity policies is clearly essential for any organization. You should ensure that your suppliers use strong encryption for data transmission and storage, especially for confidential patient information.

Look for TLS 1.2 encryption of data transfers in accordance with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 and the relevant publications from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In addition to adherence to NIST frameworks, your vendor should also be HIPAA and SOC 2 compliant.

American Pharmacists Association suggests policymakers should require redundancy systems and processes for any entity that transmits essential healthcare information related to programs that rely on federal funding, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

2. Robust Data and Analytics Capabilities

The ability to translate data into practical strategies is crucial for pharmacy organizations to enhance both patient care and business performance. Cost optimization, supply chain management and formulary compliance are just a few of the business-critical concerns that pharmacy organizations can improve on with cleaner data and better analytics.

Developing in-house solutions can be a practical way to meet the specific needs of your organization. But developing and maintaining an analytics solution requires extensive internal resources and competencies that a pharmacy organization may not have in-house.

Relying on homegrown solutions (and analytics solutions that are not built-to-purpose) can lead to issues related to scalability and integration with current pharmacy management systems, electronic health records (EHRs), and other relevant platforms. Look for a vendor that can help ensure accurate data collection, sorting and consolidation across platforms.

Finally, consider ease-of-use, especially for non-technical users. In order to extract more value from your data, your analytics platform should have an intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows pharmacy staff to easily generate reports, dashboards, and alerts without extensive technical knowledge.

3. Support for Regulatory Compliance

Beginning in 2025, The Medicare Prescription Payment Plan (M3P), as established under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, will introduce significant changes to how out-of-pocket prescription drug costs are managed for Medicare beneficiaries. These changes create several potential challenges that pharmacy organizations need to be prepared to manage.

To avoid billing issues when serving Medicare Part D enrollees, ensure pharmacists look for notification values and messages regarding the patient’s current M3P status (not yet opted in, opted in or termed).

Mitigating these risks, again, is highly dependent on data integration and interoperability across platforms. A solution that makes it easy to set up rule engines and notification triggers, including direct-to-patient notifications, can help avoid oversights and billing issues.

4. Breadth of Programs and Therapeutic Areas

By expanding into more therapeutic areas, pharmacy organizations can provide more comprehensive care, which may contribute to improved patient outcomes and better adherence to prescribed treatments. As contracted pharma brands are increasingly a selling point for pharmacies, working with a solution provider that also provides access to a broad range of therapeutic areas can be an added bonus.

Affordability or clinical safety solutions that only offer access to two or three brands aren’t the most useful for a pharmacy organization. To help ensure coverage and provide these services to a large portion of your patient base, select vendors that have access to a robust number of brands across multiple therapeutic areas.

5. Assistance with Scaling While Reducing Cost

It’s no news that the pharmacy space is in flux. To stay agile, look for vendors that offer the infrastructure and scalable capabilities to help you serve an evolving customer base, both in-store and with home delivery.

Partnering with a supplier with central filling capabilities that are equipped with advanced automation and geographically diverse strategic dispensing locations can help you expand your formulary coverage and improve medication dispensing efficiency. Virtual pharmacy services and medication dispensing can also help you reach a broader base of patients, particularly in remote and underserved regions.

Pharmacists need new digital tools to meet evolving patient needs. Increased automation can help prevent staff burnout while allowing more time for patient-focused services. But investing in automation can cause more headaches than it’s worth when solutions are siloed and lack interoperability. With a technology supplier that offers end-to-end support for automating a wide range of tasks, your digitalization can move faster and create positive dividends sooner.

CoverMyMeds offers a balance of technological innovation and human support

If you’re considering renewing a contract with your current vendor, or looking to make a change, we’re happy to discuss your needs. Rather than delivering a one-size-fits-all solution, we can work with you to tailor a suite of software and services that fit your organization’s needs.

CoverMyMeds offers a wide range of technology solutions that support the needs of modern pharmacy organizations. Backed by our parent company McKesson, we have 30+ years of experience in high-volume automation.

Our customers benefit from McKesson’s pharmacy resources, including supply chain, logistics, distribution and more. Beyond our technical capabilities, CoverMyMeds offers our customers human insight gained over years of experience.