ActualMeds
Improving Patient Outcomes through Risk Management

Several estimates attribute more than 50 percent of healthcare spending in the U.S. to a small number of individuals often described as ‘super users,’—the ones over 65 years and suffering from multiple chronic diseases. Constituting just 5 percent of the population, these are ‘high risk, high cost’ patients who take an array of medications not just for treating the diseases but also for their symptoms. Healthcare organizations and care teams accountable for the patient outcomes are thus seeking ways to reduce the healthcare expenditure for this population. A major contributor to increased healthcare costs is the risk of hospital readmissions and emergency room visits, mainly due to the failure of performing medication reconciliation when a patient is discharged from the hospital. The acute care team has little visibility to key medications taken by patients prior to hospitalization and before sending them home or to the next setting. Helping these care providers to prevent readmissions is Connecticut-based ActualMeds that offers comprehensive medication management solutions that can be integrated with existing systems and workflows, to improve patient outcomes. “We provide patient-centered medication management that reduces the risk of adverse drug events and keeps the high-risk patients out of the hospital,” says Patricia Meisner, CEO of ActualMeds.

ActualMeds offers a cloud-based platform that interoperates with Electronic Health Record (EMR) and care management systems such that medication management may be incorporated into the patient’s ongoing care, and information about their active medications can be shared across the care continuum. The platform captures data from EMR, matches it with prescriptions filled by patients and to corresponding claims data, and provides it to the care team in real-time, enabling them to immediately recognize gaps or discrepancies in the data. This automated process performed in the background ensures that the care team doesn’t have to go through any hassle of data collection, including printing information, transcribing, or calling pharmacies. The result is increased workflow efficiency that enables best practice medication reconciliation to be performed for more patients at transitions of care, with greater improvement to outcomes.

ActualMeds’ platform utilizes a robust risk rule framework that analyzes risks in drug-drug interaction as well as gaps in care at the point of care and in real-time. For instance, duplicate therapies or a missing prescription. This adds value to the care team’s time by helping them see the risk and quality measures rather than spending time on the data itself. Further, the platform generates recommendations and interventions for the care team, helping them optimize the patient’s medication regimen. ActualMeds also enables users to reconcile the medications and communicate patient medication action plans across multiple stakeholders and organizations.

We provide patient-centered medication management that reduces the risk of adverse drug events and keeps the high-risk patients out of the hospital

There are many “point” solutions to help with various aspects of medication management for patients as well as providers, but they tend to strand data with the user or confine it to the care setting. What differentiates ActualMeds from the competitors is its platform. “Whether the patients are at home, skilled nursing, or long-term care facility, there may be point solutions in each but once the patient moves to the next care setting, the medication information often does not follow. We don’t just map data from one system to another, but combine data from disparate sources and transform them to meaningful information that is available to the care team at the right time and the right place,” explains Patricia. Further adding to its strength is the dedicated team of experts in the company, most with over 20 years of experience, including business professionals, clinical pharmacists, and software developers, who understand the challenges of marrying data interoperability with medication management workflows.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to keep patients at-home for care delivery due to the extreme restrictions and capacity challenges placed in the acute care setting and, as a result, Covid and non-Covid patients are relocated across care systems. The healthcare system itself is being further transformed with the relaxation of regulatory requirements for patient care at home, including those related to telemedicine. Much of the transformation catalyzed by COVID-19 is likely to become permanent as it is directly driving the Affordable Care Act goals to deliver better healthcare cost-effectively and to improve patient outcomes. As all patients move through the care continuum, ActualMeds can provide timely information that is critical to a successful transition.

Illustrating the same, Patricia highlights an instance in which the company helped one of their pharmacy services customers to provide the New Jersey Covid-19 field hospitals with real-time medication history for patients admitted. Using the platform, the pharmacists were able to create real-time reports at the time of admission and offer it to the care team. In the absence of other major information infrastructure in the field hospitals, this helped the admitting care team view active medications that indicated any underlying medical conditions for patients as a way to triage them efficiently. Patricia also highlights the success rate of ActualMeds in the corrections system, where obtaining prisoners’ active medications during intake can be difficult. This could take days for collecting data by interviewing the person or calling local pharmacies. The risk can be extreme in these cases as the unavailability of critical medication can result in adverse drug events if intake processing is delayed, which is frequently the case in this setting. Nurses can utilize ActualMed’s tool for on-demand reports, thus preventing any delay in delivering critical patient care, while the corrections facility is accountable for the patient’s well-being.

Moving ahead, ActualMeds plans to roll out its Pharmacist-On-Demand Service (PODS)™ before the end of this year. Interestingly, this illustrates the company’s farsightedness as they started on the strategy at the end of the last year, and Covid-19 has accelerated the plans to bring it to the market. Through this technologyenabled service, ActualMeds allows pharmacists’ clinical services to be scaled across the care continuum and fill the current market gap that cannot be filled by telehealth solutions alone.