MACRA stands for the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. It’s not been passed yet, but likely some version of it is coming. The point of MACRA is mostly to help wrangle existing reimbursable quality metrics under one standard. MIPS stands for Merit-Based Incentive Payment Systems. Today I speak with Eric Levin from McKesson Business Performance Services. We follow the dollar through this tangled web we’ve woven.

There are 5 kinds of Pharmacies – Closed, Community, Compounding, Consulting, and Specialty. It would have been poetic and memorable if we could have talked about the 5 C’s of Pharmacy, but salting our game, we have that ‘S’ outlier: Specialty. Today, I speak with Todd Eury, founding father of the Pharmacy Podcast, amongst other pursuits, about the 4 C’s and one ‘S’ of pharmacy, including the growing relationships between pharmacists and other healthcare stakeholders, and how to better help patients addicted to pain medications.

We all talk about how we don’t want to be a solution looking around for a problem…not solving a marketplace problem or filling an identified need is such a bad start that even the best strategy and tactics will be unlikely to save it.
So today I wanted to talk about something that I don’t hear discussed often enough – what makes a problem an excellent problem? Because if the problem is awesome enough, its solution has every chance of being a barnstormer. People will want that solution. We all want our problems solved.

Jerry Fahrni is a pharmacy informatics consultant who knows what it takes to insert pharmacists into the continuum of care. We talk today about how pharmacists can help improve patient outcomes, but also about the gaps that exist which hinder this vision. Foreshadowing – it’s a technology and interoperability fandango, as well as in a broad stroke the mindset of pharmacists themselves.

Today I speak with Jonathan Ozeran from Zest Health about what it takes to help employees make better healthcare decisions and take advantage of the resources that an employer might make available for them to do so. Zest Health does this by providing a kind of wrap around technology and support platform so employees can interact in ways which are convenient and comfortable and don’t involve reading 76-page forms. Chat, as it turns out, is a really popular way for employees to get health information, for example.