At Evernorth Health Services, we are relentlessly focused on improving the way care is accessed, delivered, and coordinated to drive better health outcomes and affordability. Our teams are committed to providing solutions to key stakeholders in the health care industry. Among these stakeholders are health care physicians, many of whom work in hospitals and health systems and deliver critical support for the growing number of patients requiring specialty care.
Today, hospitals, health systems and their physicians are diversifying the services they offer — beyond general acute care — to better treat patients and enhance their performance. In fact, according to a recent survey from McKinsey, more than 70% of health system executives intend to invest in diversification — including value-based care services, virtual care, clinical data and analytics support, and specialty care — in the coming years.
Guided by our partnership orientation, Evernorth is entering into a multi-year strategic partnership with, and making an investment in, CarepathRx Health System Solutions (CHSS), a leader in providing end-to-end pharmacy care delivery. CHSS serves a growing base of 600-plus hospitals, health systems, and their physicians nationwide, helping them with their in-house specialty pharmacies and offering patient management technology solutions, virtual pharmacy care, infusion management, polypharmacy services, and pharmacy operations.
Together, Evernorth’s and CHSS’ complementary expertise will help hospitals, health systems, and their physicians diversify their offerings while enabling stronger patient connections to needed specialty care for chronic and complex conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, cancer, and more.
“Forging deeper relationships with physicians and other specialty pharmacies — a critical point of care for people with specialty needs — is a key priority as we work to increase access to care and improve affordability,” said Eric Palmer, president and chief executive officer, Evernorth Health Services. “CarepathRx Health System Solutions is having a profound impact on specialty care today, bolstered by their laser focus on quality, and forging deep relationships with physicians. Our partnership is an important step in delivering on Evernorth’s commitment to bring physician, hospital, and health system partners even more specialty and care services to improve patient outcomes.”
The partnership puts Evernorth at the center of driving even better patient outcomes by:
- Forging deeper relationships with physicians who are treating patients at key points of care.
- Deepening connections to specialty pharmacies within hospital systems dispensing multiple specialty drugs under the medical benefit, including those in oncology and the rare and orphan disease space.
- Enhancing infusion services across sites of care — from ambulatory to physician office to home settings — and future value-based site-of-care strategies.
In turn, Evernorth will bring its diverse specialty and care resources to CHSS’ current and future physicians and patients, including:
- A suite of health services, anchored by Accredo’s leading specialty care and pharmacy expertise and CuraScript SD’s specialty medication distribution capabilities across 12,000-plus health care physicians.
- Enhanced specialty care management, coordinated infusion services, virtual care capabilities, value-based care arrangements, and site-of-care flexibility.
- Broader access to specialty patients and insights into their care paths across both pharmacy and medical management.
Over time, through the partnership, Evernorth intends to provide greater site-of-care connections for infusion services to alternative sites of care, evolve value-based site-of-care strategies, enhance data integration within and across health systems to identify optimal treatment plans, and deepen physician and patient engagement.
“This is an important step in accelerating our health system services expansion and care delivery strategy,” said Earl English, senior vice president, Health System Services, Evernorth Health Services. “By partnering with top innovators in health care and combining them with our best-in-class solutions, we can deliver more value to more people together. Our combined reach with CHSS will advance our shared goal of driving physician performance, better health, and greater affordability.”
