Medications managed: Our investment in Arine

Medication errors cost the US healthcare system over $525B each year—roughly one in every six healthcare dollars spent¹. With higher incidence of chronic conditions, an aging population, and rise in prescription drug spend, the severity and costs will only increase. Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Arine, whose solution combines data science with clinical expertise to ensure patients are on the safest and most effective medication regimens.

Over a third of patients never discuss their existing medications with their provider, and over half receive prescriptions from more than one.² These issues, layered on top of a fragmented data-sharing infrastructure, creates a perfect storm of unnecessary costs and poor health outcomes. That’s where Arine’s Virtual Pharmacist platform comes in. The platform aggregates and analyzes a range of clinical and behavioral data to identify and resolve gaps in a patient’s care plan. This streamlines a historically labor-intensive manual process, enabling medication optimization at scale.

The Virtual Pharmacist software automatically triangulates data from numerous sources, including medical and pharmacy claims, lab results, EMR data, and quality and risk data, alongside a tailored patient-facing questionnaire to generate a complete picture of a patient’s health. Arine then uses its algorithms to generate actionable medication recommendations based on the latest available clinical guidelines, all while measuring the clinical and economic impact of these interventions.

The Virtual Pharmacist platform actively monitors and analyzes relevant health data to detect, flag, and resolve clinical issues. For instance, an individual may unknowingly be taking a harmful combination of medications, due to a lack of communication and coordination among disparate providers. The platform identifies these issues and pushes care plan recommendations, including reference guidelines and optimal drug and dose information, to all providers involved via their preferred methods of communication. It simultaneously provides recommendations on how to lower costs based on a payer’s drug coverage criteria while reducing out-of-pocket costs for patients. Arine then closes the loop with care teams to confirm recommendations are implemented, ensuring members receive the best possible care.

In the millions of patient record-sets analyzed thus far, Arine has identified an average of six addressable care gaps for each high-risk, high-cost member. These insights—which can be surfaced for its payer and risk-bearing provider customers within a matter of days—allow Arine to tailor the Virtual Pharmacist platform to each of its customer’s pain points by providing targeted recommendations at the individual patient level while supporting broader population health management.

Since going live with its customers in 2019, Arine has demonstrated significant positive clinical and economic outcomes. In a recent Medicaid-focused project, Arine was able to show a 40% reduction in hospitalizations across a high-risk, high-cost population, as well as a 92% implementation rate of the company’s recommended care plan changes by primary care physicians and specialists.

To date, Arine has completed thousands of clinical interventions resulting in notable health improvement for patients and cost savings for its customers. We’re beyond thrilled to work alongside Yoona, David, Boom, and the entire team on their journey to alleviate healthcare costs and support healthier patient outcomes. Welcome, Arine!

Get in touch with Arine to learn how the Virtual Pharmacist platform can help your members.

Footnotes

¹Watanabe JH, McInnis T, Hirsch JD. Cost of Prescription Drug-Related Morbidity and Mortality. Ann Pharmacother. 2018 Sep;52(9):829-837.
²Carr, Teresa. https://www.consumerreports.org/prescription-drugs/too-many-meds-americas-love- affair-with-prescription-medication/#nation.