Rx Savings Access creates partnerships for retailers and customers alike

Drug Store News,  July 19, 2004  

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When you go into battle, you want a strong force at your back. And when it comes to supporting any of the six dozen Medicare-approved prescription discount cards now available either nationally or locally, pharmacy retailers may have a natural ally in McKesson Corp.

McKesson is one of 28 corporate and group sponsors whose application to market prescription discount drug cards to Medicare enrollees was approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. McKesson's Rx Savings Access[TM] card has an open formulary, providing seniors with discounts on a wide range of branded and generic drugs without restrictions found in some programs. The McKesson card also does not encourage seniors to get their chronic-care medications from mail-order pharmacies; it allows for full freedom of choice in pharmacy outlets, which is important for retail pharmacy operators. In fact, it is the only card that has no association with a third-party mail-order organization.

"Because we believe so strongly in the value pharmacists provide to patients, the Rx Savings Access[TM] card will offer the same level of discounts, whether purchased as a single prescription or in up to 90-day supplies at the pharmacy counter, or through a pharmacy's mail-order program," noted executive vice president Paul Julian.

"That's what we believe distinguishes our card," added Pat Blake, president of customer operations. "It's designed to ensure that our retailers can continue to keep these patients in their stores and service this population of seniors who have been good, loyal customers, and who frankly may need the services of that local pharmacist, as opposed to a mail-order-only alternative."

That makes McKesson's Rx Savings Access[TM] card "an opportunity for our customers to retain a very critical part of their business," Blake continued. "That's the message our sales reps are taking to them. It's not just about selling more generics this week, where obviously we make money. It's about helping them manage their own destiny by providing them an alternative to a program that will direct patients to mail order now and beyond 2006."

McKesson's discount card programs fall under its specialty pharmaceutical services group, led by president Brian Tyler. In addition to running discount card operations, the specialty division helps patients and health providers manage high-cost, often injectable biopharmaceuticals, and other specialized medications to treat chronic and serious illnesses. To do so, the specialty group works with manufacturers, payers and physicians, as well as across multiple delivery channels, including direct-to-physician delivery and retail pharmacies.

"What we're trying to do in specialty pharmacy is make sure that if a patient shows up in a store with a specialty script, that pharmacy has a mechanism to get that script filled and back to the patient," Tyler explained. It's important because "if we can provide a mechanism for retail to fulfill that specialty script, it keeps the traffic in the stores--and for every specialty script, there are six or eight traditional retail scripts that come with it," he said.

Tyler's team developed the expertise to carry out a pharmacy discount card program through its experience in working with physicians and pharmacy retailers to administer trial prescription programs on behalf of drug manufacturers. Unlike traditional drug sampling programs run solely by and for doctors and their patients, McKesson's trial script program involves community pharmacists who help distribute samples.

McKesson's role in the process is to adjudicate the trial program, billing the manufacturer for the script and making sure the pharmacies get paid. "We operate the adjudication engine in that we pay the pharmacy for the service and collect from the manufacturer," Tyler explained. "It allows the pharmacy to participate in the sample prescription process, which helps drive patients into the stores."

The trial script program also gave McKesson critical experience in running a pharmacy-based patient adjudication program. In turn, the know-how helped lead to McKesson's selection in 2002 as administrator of the 2-year-old Together Rx[TM] discount card program, through which a consortium of seven drug manufacturers provide discounts to low-income seniors on many of their products.

"Because we were already in that business, we had the ability to adjudicate pharmacy transactions. And we used that capability to become the administrator of the Together Rx program, which was one of the most successful and largest discount card programs out there," Tyler told Drug Store News. Indeed, as of mid-May, Together Rx[TM] had enrolled more than 1.3 million seniors and processed some 8.3 million prescriptions, according to McKesson.

McKesson's proven ability to run Together Rx[TM] also led the company to launch its own CMS-endorsed card this spring. "When this notion of CMS cards came along, we felt we were pretty well positioned, from an infrastructure perspective, to participate in that," Tyler said. "We've been through this before, we've done the consumer research and felt we'd have strong retail support. We know how to put this together."