Healthcare POS Systems Case Study

About Atrius Health–Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates:

Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates (AH-HVMA):  Atrius Health, Inc. is a high performing Accountable Care Organization (ACO) delivering coordinated care to over 750,000 members across 31 practices and 15 pharmacies throughout Eastern Massachusetts.

In the Beginning:

AH-HVMA began our partnership with CORE in 2010 when our organization was evaluating ambulatory and retail pharmacy point of sale (POS) systems to manage dispense-to-payment workflows for the fourteen (now 15) pharmacies located within our clinics.

How CORE Helped

After a thorough screening process, we selected CORE to partner with us on this project. What made CORE different for us was the flexibility of their iPayment solution, technology and innovation opportunities, and their local corporate presence.

The ability for iPayment to reflect our pharmacy dispensing and payment workflows without imposing a rigid framework in which we would have to be structured was important for us. CORE had a great understanding that “one size doesn’t fit all”.

Results

Beyond our successful go-live in 2011, our partnership with CORE has continually grown over the years as we migrated our old dispensing system to a new system. This migration proved to be a challenge, as each dispensing system was different from the next. However, CORE was adaptive to reflect altered dispensing workflows rather than us having to adapt to their  workflows.

Moving Forward

As our organization has grown over the decades, CORE has been able to evolve with us every step of the way. During 2019, we worked together to expand and redefine the relationship between both organizations.

There were several key focus areas including Mail Order, Clinical POS and technology as follows:

Mail Order:  This was a key focus for us for 2019 and 2020. With mail order becoming an increasing aspect of our pharmacy strategic focus, the ability to optimize dispense to payment workflows. CORE worked very closely with us to document, and implement enhanced workflows for managing and processing mail order payments including the implementation of stored accounts on file to streamline the fulfillment of mail order prescription processing. The specific workflows implemented were a great success for our pharmacy team as well as for our plan members.

Leadership Vision: During this same time period, our organization, having recognized CORE’s value for processing payments in the pharmacy, elected to engage CORE to integrate its credit card payment processing capabilities across all 15 clinics and 250 Epic check-in locations. This will  provide us with a single enterprise payment processing platform, providing our Compliance team, Finance, users and consumers with a common and consistent process for managing payments.

Technology: As part of our recent initiatives, CORE recommended we consider moving the organization to a hosted solution residing in their data center. At first, we were somewhat reluctant, but we worked closely with CORE to better understand the value this could drive for use from a PCI compliance, financial and resource perspective.

Our senior technology leadership encouraged us to explore this expanded partnership. We agreed to migrate our existing CORE pharmacy platform as well as the clinical cashiering to CORE’s hosted environment. This has allowed us to focus more of our time and resources on our patients and consumers while CORE supports the systems infrastructure on our behalf.

Future Plans

We are looking forward to engaging with CORE on a number of additional initiatives, such as controlled substance sales and mobile opportunities to better serve our membership.

To learn more about Atrius Health visit: https://www.atriushealth.org/about-us