New drugs are coming to market faster than ever. For many patients, new pharmaceutical therapies represent the potential for life-changing impact. Yet uncertain uptake of these often high-cost specialty drugs poses a significant risk for pharmacy budgets. To protect you from surprises, Commonwealth Medicine pharmacists and data analysts provide expert Budget Impact Forecasting.

Research shows a connection between oral health and overall wellness. To improve access to oral health care, more than 78 percent of Massachusetts Community Health Centers (CHCs) offer direct dental services at approximately 58 state-wide locations. Adequate staffing and expertise are critical to providing care. However, little is known about the recruitment and retention of the vitally important dental workforce. Commonwealth Medicine designed and implemented a survey in 2018 to understand the motivators and barriers that influence the recruitment and retention of the dental workforce at CHCs.

Commonwealth Medicine's newborn screening experts have developed an algorithm that can be used to tell when a newborn's genotype may need to be retested. Learn more about this formula, which can determine when alleleic dropout has occurred, and find out why this practice could be vital for newborn screening programs across the country in this presentation.

In this presentation, Stephanie Tran, PharmD, clinical consultant pharmacist, explains how a retrospective compounding monitoring program demonstrated a reduction in per member per year spend through the placement of select high-cost compounding ingredients on prior authorization.

Director of Child and Family Policy Audrey Smolkin discusses interventions to promote children's resilience to minimize the long-term effects of trauma.

Karen Clements, senior project director, Research and Evaluation, co-authored this poster on providing Medicaid populations with access to advanced hep C treatments which was nominated for best poster at the recent Academy Health 2020 Annual Research Meeting.

For children of color, early-life traumas increase the risk for long-term physical and mental health issues. Audrey Smolkin, director of Child and Family Policy at the UMass Med School, discusses the need for training on the link between race, trauma, and resilience.

Reviewing applications for disability retirement benefits is a complex and time-sensitive process. Getting it right protects plan members and the financial soundness of the plan itself. Commonwealth Medicine empowers its team of licensed and credentialed case reviewers with secure, cloud-based technology to maintain operational continuity—even during a pandemic. The result is accurate, fair and timely disability recommendations.

Pharmacy experts from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Commonwealth Medicine completed a study on whether the overall benefit of sacubitril/valsartan outweighed the cost of the drug within a Medicaid population. Previous studies have shown that patients treated with sacubitril/valsartan had lower rates of hospitalizations, but before now, the data on the economic impact of the drug on a Medicaid population was limited.

The Director of the Charitable Trusts Unit, within the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, is charged with reviewing transactions involving health care charitable trusts, including non-profit hospitals, to determine whether these transactions are in the best interest of the community. The Charitable Trusts Unit retained the Health Law & Policy team at Commonwealth Medicine, UMass Medical School, to perform a thorough, impartial review of the Hospital Corporation of America’s (HCA) proposed acquisition of Frisbie Memorial Hospital.