One stop shop for clinical data - Health Gorilla launches partnership with DrFirst

The announcement was made on January 25 that the two companies have launched Pharmacy Data, a new product enabling access to complete history data from most major pharmacies in the US.

DrFirst will use its MedHx Population Risk Management (PRM) solution to provide deduplicated medication history from local and national data sources, including prescribing data, pharmacy dispensing data, and pharmacy benefits manager claims.

Steve Yaskin, CEO and Health Gorilla co-founder said: “With clinical and pharmacy data in one place, care teams can close care gaps for good. The most common request from our customers has been more robust clinical records, and this partnership with DrFirst will achieve that​.”

Adverse drug effects 

The companies say research they carried out shows that people not sticking with their medication causes 10% of all hospitalizations and that adverse drug events including physical or mental harm or loss of function result in 1.3 million emergency department visits. They found that factors including high out-of-pocket costs, concerns about side-effects and procrastination lead to patients abandoning up to 30% of new prescriptions.  

“It may seem obvious that patients’ medication records should be easily accessible to their healthcare providers​,” said G. Cameron Deemer, CEO of DrFirst. “But that’s often not the case. In fact, gathering clinical data such as medication history can be a tremendously manual and time-consuming process. Our new partnership with Health Gorilla will ease this process for clinicians by providing complete and accurate data to timely inform healthcare decisions and care management​.”

Addressing gaps in care 

Both companies believe that by being able to access pharmacy and prescribing information will reduce the data collection burden for healthcare organizations and it will help to address gaps in electronic health record (EHR) data. They say this will give a more holistic view of patients enabling better care and will allow providers to address gaps in care, improve medication and reduce strain on the health service.

MedHx PRM is based on DrFirst’s MedHx, which streamlines medication reconciliation workflows by providing accurate and clinically actionable medication history for individual patients at hospital admission and in the emergency department. MedHx PRM extends the solution from individuals to populations of patients.