What you should know:
– Waltz Health, a digital health company developing smarter, technology-enabled ways to price, distribute and prescribe medications, today introduced Waltz Connect, a new end-to-end solution that manages all aspects of a payer’s specialty drug reimbursement.
– It includes proprietary technology, patient engagement support, and a unique dynamic marketplace with a network of high-quality specialty pharmacies that compete on price, service level, and clinical outcomes.
Waltz Connect: Revolutionizing the specialty pharmacy with AI-powered transparency and efficiency
Waltz Connect is transforming specialty pharmacy management by providing payers with unprecedented transparency, fostering competition among specialty pharmacies, and significantly reducing specialty drug costs. The platform improves member experience and health outcomes through its customizable design and allows payers to implement it across their entire specialty drug formulary, for specific drug classes, or even down to individual drugs. Powered by Waltz Health’s AI-powered Intelligent Specialty Engine, Waltz Connect optimizes prescription delivery to identify the most appropriate specialty pharmacy based on criteria selected by each payer.
Key highlights:
– Specialty drug costs and challenges: Specialty drug costs have risen to over $300 billion per year in recent years, a 40% increase. They now account for over half of all U.S. drug spending. The traditional process of filling specialty drugs is riddled with inefficiencies:
– Patients often have to wait weeks for medication.
– Pharmacies often receive prescriptions that they cannot fill.
– Payers incur unnecessarily higher costs for identical medications.
– Overall costs increase when lower-cost pharmacy options are overlooked.
– Efficient prescription routing: Waltz Connect redesigns the prescription process to make it more efficient and effective. When a specialty prescription is submitted, the solution routes it to the optimal pharmacy, regardless of the receiving pharmacy’s network status with the payer, based on:
– The performance of the member.
– A weighted list of attributes (e.g. price, processing time, fulfillment accuracy, member experience, compliance rates).
– Customizable attributes by drug class or specific drugs to ensure optimal pharmacy utilization with minimal effort.
– Comprehensive data collection: Waltz Connect collects key information to ensure a consistent and seamless member experience, including:
– Details of the member’s condition.
– Information on prescription recording.
– Contact details of the selected pharmacy.
– Estimated processing time and number of refills.
– Payers benefit from more predictable pricing, while members have less hassle when redeeming prescriptions.
Strategic partnerships and milestones:
– New Network Expansion: Waltz Health announced that Reliance Rx has joined Waltz’s specialty network, providing payers with a powerful and cost-effective fulfillment option for generic specialty drugs.
– Expansion and Impact: Over the past year, Waltz Health has achieved significant milestones, including:
– Officially entered the payer, pharmacy benefit manager and self-insured employer markets.
– Unique deployments of Marketplace Search technology with SCAN Health Plan and a national commercial health insurance plan.
– Implemented Marketplace Search in four national pharmacy chains with thousands of locations, resulting in an average savings of $5-$10 per prescription compared to other drug savings card solutions.
Waltz Connect represents a critical advancement toward streamlined, cost-effective and patient-centric specialty pharmacy management.
“Our novel approach leverages modern technology to bring transparency, efficiency and flexibility to specialty drug benefit management. For too long, the opaque and outdated structure of the traditional specialty drug supply chain has led to inefficiencies and perverse incentives that have driven up healthcare costs,” said Mark Thierer, co-founder and CEO of Waltz Health.
