Empowering Pharmacy Teams
to Improve Patient Outcomes
EQUIPP empowers Rite Aid pharmacists to transform medication adherence – here’s their story.
From helping patients stay on track with their medications to streamlining healthcare delivery, Rite Aid is transforming pharmacy care through EQUIPP.
Under the leadership of Emilee Kennelly, Manager of Adherence Improvement and Clinical Services, Rite Aid has strengthened its commitment to patient health by enabling pharmacy teams with innovative technology. Their recent technological investments reflect a broader mission: making healthcare simpler and more accessible for every customer they serve.
Leaning into Technology
As a frontline witness to patient struggles, Kennelly illuminates the obstacles many Rite Aid customers face in accessing healthcare, while highlighting how technological innovations are enabling both pharmacists and patients to overcome these barriers. “We’ve really leaned into our technology offerings to simplify what we can. These efficiencies also come with the added benefit of freeing up our pharmacists to provide more direct patient care. Through these technology enhancements, we’re really aiming to make it easier to identify customers who might need our adherence support to enjoy the full benefit of medications and their disease state management.”
Rite Aid has a patented clinical opportunity identification tool within their dispensing system that identifies customers that have individualized clinical opportunities during in-care workflow. For patients who schedule a vaccine appointment, the pharmacists can see what other clinical opportunities such as CMR’s or adherence gap closures are available to the customer that they’re about to immunize.
“We’re really excited about the possibility of our pharmacies being able to use these technologies to kind of make the most of their time with our customers,” states Kennelly. “Having that face time with the customer as you give them immunization is absolutely invaluable, and we want to be able to capitalize on that time to improve their health by making it as easy as possible to understand what the customer’s needs are.”
“The adherence and site offerings that EQUIPP has offered us have really helped us to hone our focus and over the last few months, to help identify those customers who need a little more assistance with their adherence, and then also managing their medications.”
How Rite Aid Uses EQUIPP to Manage Medication Adherence
“We truly appreciate having a partnership with EQUIPP… to help identify those customers in danger of falling into non-adherence and those health complications that we really want to avoid.”
“The adherence and site offerings that EQUIPP has offered us have really helped us to hone our focus and over the last few months, to help identify those customers who need a little more assistance with their adherence, and then also managing their medications, … probably where we found a lot of success with Rite Aid being involved in the Longitudinal Adherence Monitoring Program or LAMP to monitor medication adherence for certain customers identified by their insurance plan,” says Kennelly.
“The LAMP program identifies customers that are in danger of becoming non adherent, and this partnership and program have been so valuable for us in driving our adherence conversations with these identified customers.”
Kennelly adds that medication adherence is important in helping their customers to achieve the full benefit of a medication regimen to help manage their disease state and improve their overall health.
“We love that programs such as this one allow us to kind of be nimble and intervene before these health problems actually present. These adherence monitoring programs such as the LAMP programs, help us to intervene with customers before they miss doses of their medication.”
“The proportion of days covered calculation has helped to establish important baselines over the years, but Rite Aid has been eager to complement this traditional measure with more dynamic, real-time insights,” Kennelly says.
Embracing Value-Based Care
The pandemic magnified some of the issues that our community pharmacists are facing, such as pockets of understaffing, coupled with increased demand for immunization services, MTM services, and point of care also known as value based services.
Kennelly states she would love to see and help drive excitement in the community pharmacy through an increase in these services offered through community pharmacy, expanding into point of care testing, hormonal contraceptive prescribing in certain states, and MTM offerings at Rite Aid.
“I think that embracing value based contracting can really drive excitement in our pharmacies, and… I’m really thankful to work for a company that prioritizes allowing pharmacists to practice at the top of their license and use those skills that they’ve learned.”
She adds that Rite Aid has shown great results with their clinical pharmacist model of pharmacy staffing, where they place a full time pharmacist in select stores dedicated solely to driving value-based, clinical services.
“Value-based care and its success are really based on patient outcomes, but we can’t impact patient care and drive successful results, if we are spread too thin,” says Kennelly. “There’s truly an endless number of value-based services, such as A1c screenings, blood pressure screenings, point of care testing, that can be offered at this point. We’ve been working to stay strategic in those offerings just by focusing on the value-based services that we know that we can provide at a high level.”
“Going back to that idea of using technology to drive patient care, we made it easy for our customers to schedule these services to fit it in, with their busy schedules,” added Kennelly. “As we all know, retail pharmacists are truly one of the most accessible health care providers, and we’ve been working really hard to offer our services to the community through these value based offerings.”
Through their commitment to expanding pharmacists’ roles, Rite Aid is transforming traditional pharmacy care into comprehensive health management. As their pharmacists deliver value-based services that go beyond medication dispensing – they help customers achieve better adherence, manage chronic conditions more effectively, and work toward optimal health outcomes. This patient-centered approach ensures that Rite Aid customers receive the support they need for lifelong wellness.
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