On Capitol Hill, Experts Discuss Health Policy, PBMs, Drug Shortages, and More

At the Association of Cancer Care Centers (ACCC) 51st Annual Meeting & Cancer Center Business Summit in Washington, DC, Jorge García, PharmD, MS, MBA, MHA, FACHE, FACCC, reflects on his experience at ACCC Capitol Hill Day, where discussions with policy makers centered on prior authorization reform, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and drug shortages. García serves as assistant vice president of system oncology pharmacy services and system infusion pharmacy services at Baptist Health South Florida.

He also highlights pharmacy optimization efforts, including expanding infusion services to improve treatment access for patients, and emphasizes the need for expanded infrastructure to meet future patient demand.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Can you talk about some of the highlights from ACCC Capitol Hill Day?

Thank you. Capitol Hill was amazing. It was my first super fun day [at the meeting]. We went to many senators and representative officers and saw a lot of the staffers. I think what was exciting for me is we were actually meeting with the health policy team, and they were very educated on health policy issues. For example, we were not necessarily speaking about PBMs in this meeting, but most of them brought it up, understanding that that is an area where there's a lot of opportunities for us to drive value.

But I think we had a very unique opportunity to talk to them about the authorization process. We had an opportunity to thank them for the ability to compensate now navigation services. We wanted to make sure we were not just asking them for help on things, but recognizing their efforts on some of the legislative action that has now allowed our practices to have more viable navigation services, and talked about a number of other critical issues in health care like drug shortages and a number of things. I feel like they are well equipped to be able to help us achieve a better quality of care in the cancer space.

On the topic of pharmacy optimization, what innovative approaches have you seen in leveraging pharmacy services to enhance patient access and operational efficiency?

Optimization—there are so many potential things to focus on in pharmacy, and it is a very exciting time to be a pharmacy leader, to really help shape up the organization strategy and the care settings that we make available for patients.

One of the things that we've worked on recently is expanding our infusion capabilities for patients—and this includes cancer patients, it includes benign hematology patients like anemia patients who face great, great challenges accessing care—to see a hematologist, but also to be able to land an appointment for an infusion chair.

In our geography, we see patients going across county lines trying to find a willing infusion provider, and so we've capitalized on that care need to expand our infusion capabilities through our geography of 4 counties now to a total of 10 infusion centers. This has really landed us an opportunity to diversify our services [and] meet an expanding patient care need. And as we look at the pipeline of products and into the future, we see a vast number of pharmaceuticals—especially the large minority of rare disease—being in this IV [intravenous] dosage form. So, it was clear to us that if we wanted to be ready for that demand coming into the future, just expanding our infusion infrastructure was going to be needed to meet that demand. That has been a win-win: a win for patients in terms of access, and a win for us in terms of new services for our organization.