Dr Christina Barrington: Education, Mentorship, Business Acumen Key to Successful Managed Care Organization

Christina Barrington, PharmD, of Priority Health, discussed the key ingredients in a successful managed care organization and the resources she uses to stay up to date on health care and pharmacy industry trends. She also predicted where the managed care field will be in the future, taking into account emerging trends and innovations. Barrington discussed this topic at length during the AMCP Nexus session "Executive to Executive: Leading Managed Care Organizations Today" on October 17.

Barrington is currently Priority Health's vice president and chief pharmacy officer, leading both the pharmacy operations and clinical pharmacy teams. She is also AMCP's 2023-2024 Board of Directors president-elect.

Transcript

What are the key drivers to success in the managed care pharmacy industry and how do they contribute to the success of your organization?

As a pharmacy executive within my organization, and for other pharmacy executives, I think the key factors for being successful, 1 is education, having a vast knowledge of the profession and managed care, not only in pharmacy, but beyond pharmacy.

In other areas of the organization, a good business acumen, understanding the business and being able to see the numbers, understand those numbers, and have an impact on that. As far as staff development, being a mentor and a resource, not only for my staff, but for other staff members within our organization.

As a managed care executive, how do you stay up to date on the latest developments in the health care and pharmacy industries? Are there any specific resources you use to keep your organization informed?

We use all of the daily news feeds, Wall Street Journal, all of the press releases that come out on a daily basis; we scour those every day to keep track of what's happening in the news. We use resources like IPD Analytics to do our predictive modeling, look at trends, look at the pipeline, and clinical data.

We also do our own clinical literature searches on the internet. My team is very adept at doing that, and we try to keep the bias out of all of our reviews and analyses.

Where do you envision the managed care pharmacy field to be in the future? Are there any emerging trends or innovations that you believe will significantly impact the industry?

I think there's been a lot of change in the market. We're seeing things like Mark Cuban, Amazon Pharmacy. We're seeing, recently, Blue Cross Blue Shield of California announcing a different pharmacy model with regards to their PBM [pharmacy benefit manager].

I think it's the start of a lot of changes for us in managed care, and I think we're going to see many more programs being developed to help address the costs. We're going to see more of a cash option for many of our members outside of their traditional pharmacy benefit.