Healthcare Policy and Pharmacy’s Evolving Role with SureScripts’ Deanne Primozic

In this episode of Health Biz Talk, host Tony Trenkle, former CMS CIO, discusses with Deanne Primozic, healthcare policy leader at Surescripts, about transforming pharmacy services and advancing healthcare interoperability. The conversation explores how AI is streamlining administrative processes while raising critical questions about regulation and patient safety. Primozic also addresses the urgent need for a federal privacy framework, the challenges of state-by-state patchwork regulations, and the importance of public-private partnerships through the CMS Aligned Network initiative in advancing healthcare policy and technology innovation.

00:00:00 Intro
Welcome to Health Biz Talk, the industry’s leading podcast that brings you today’s top innovators and leading voices in healthcare technology, business and policy. And here’s your host, Tony Trenkle, former CMS, CIO and health IT industry leader.

00:00:12 Tony
Hi, I’m here to introduce Deanne Primozic. And deanne brings a distinctive approach to blends education and advocacy across health technology strategy and consulting. She is recognised for bridging policy, healthcare transformation and corporate strategy to strengthen resilience, sharpen competitiveness and capture emerging opportunities. In her current executive leadership role at Surescripts and her previous role at Change Healthcare, she established and scaled national health policy functions, Guidant enterprise strategy in regulated markets and and represented the industry on national committees shaping US healthcare policy. So, deanne, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:03 Deanne
Thanks, Tony. Thank you for inviting me.

00:01:06 Tony
So, the way we always start off here, Deanne, I do a little intro, but we’ll just do a little bit more digging and ask about, you know, how you kind of got to where you’re at today, background interests, major career decisions. So if you want to kind of just, you know, expound a little bit on what we’ve just introduced you with.

00:01:28 Deanne
Sure. Well, all of my career has been in some sort of capacity within healthcare. And the reason I got interested in healthcare is I started out pre med in college, was very interested in becoming a physician and interned my senior year of high school. One internship was with an orthopaedic surgeon because that interested me, and then also interned in a hospital laboratory, which is really fascinating because everything that goes on in the hospital, where pretty much everything comes to the lab, whether it’s a surgical specimen, a blood test or some other kind of diagnostic. And then, of course, unfortunately, if things don’t go so well in the hospital, the first thing we did on my morning shift was take inventory in the hospital morgue and figure out what needed to be done there. 

Yeah, things that I would come home and tell my parents about at dinner. And I’m sure they wish that I hadn’t told them about some of the things that we saw, particularly during my pathology rotation. But anyway, fast forwarding to undergraduate and I realised that perhaps I didn’t necessarily have an interest to go through just what it takes to finish med school and go through a residency. I mean, that is not something you just, you know, do lightly. And the joke was, if you choose not to go to med school, there’s always the business school. So I ended up. Ended up on the business side of medicine, if you will. Definitely on the it side of medicine and having gone to the University of Maryland in College park and also my entire career being in the D.C. area, as I tell some of my colleagues who have never lived in dc, it’s really hard not to be pulled into something that isn’t government related, whether that is being a federal contractor or working for an agency as an employee outright or working on the Hill or supporting the Hill or even. 

I did some time working for eds, which is now Peraton after their many sales and acquisitions supporting state Medicaid, MMIs, Medicaid managed information Systems. So it’s been a pretty wild ride. But I think it’s neat to see for me personally the way that technology has really transformed, particularly in the last decade. I feel like our buzzwords in healthcare 10 years ago was blockchain, blockchain was gonna be the solution. And now we’ve move AI. So it’s fascinating. And quantum, Quantum isn’t very too far behind as well.

00:04:02 Tony
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting watching the evolution. Like you, I’m a child of the Baltimore Washington area, so you, all of us are kind of members of the same tribe of government workers, government influencers, etc. But one of the companies I worked with quite extensively when I was at CMS was Shore Scripts. And I know you’ve been with Surescripts now for I guess what, a couple of years now is.

00:08:37 Tony
Okay, great. Well, it sounds like it can potentially be a step forward. What are you going to measure in terms of success metrics for something like that?

00:08:49 Deanne
Yeah, I think really when you look at what success is. I know we recently had a conversation with one of the federal agencies about our metrics for real time pharmacy benefit. Money saved was one conversation. How much, how, what is the engagement? How often is it being used? What are the specialties, types of medications that are really being engaged on real time the most? This is all data from our network that we publish every first week in March thereabouts. It’s called our annual progress report, or I believe now we’re calling it our impact report. But this is all data from the Surescripts network and we’ll be able to see what the engagement is, how decisions are being made and the average savings for different classes of prescription, I would imagine, just like we do with our real time data.

00:09:38 Tony
Right, right. That’s definitely something that would be of great interest to a lot of people, especially policymakers who are looking at potential impacts. So going back to the pharmacist, what are some other roles you think they could play in terms of patient care areas? And maybe we can talk about it in terms of the rural health transformation programme that CMS has started. Maybe we can kind of posit this is looking at it from that perspective. But also, even if there’s a larger potential role that you see based on where the industry’s going.

00:10:16 Deanne
Sure, no great question. And I’m always in awe of my pharmacist colleagues in terms of the things that they’ve studied and the capabilities that they learned through their pharmacy education. Myself, being pre med, I can’t say I was really privy to that until I came to Surescripts and then just realised like, wow, there’s a lot of knowledge there. But you know, rural health transformation, that whole programme that CMS set up out of the HR1, or big beautiful bill, depending on how you want to call it, that is really a transformational opportunity for states to either increase the scope of practise for pharmacists, if they haven’t done it yet, they have two years to pass legislation to enable that, or to really build upon permissions where pharmacists already have that we’re considered top of scope of practise. 

And what do I mean by scope of practise? Well, a lot of what we saw, even during the pandemic, across all the states through the COVID and public health waivers, were pharmacists being able to test to treat for COVID 19 or now they’re in many states able to test to treat for things like flu and strep throat and rsv. And so a lot of states have had that in their ongoing scope of practise. But for states who have not, Rural Health is giving incentives and actually bonus points for states to incorporate more pharmacy services. Realising that, number one, as you mentioned earlier in this conversation, there’s a lot of medication management, there’s a lot of just basic medication counselling, there’s a lot of better health counselling in addition to tests to treat or administering vaccines or administering contraception in some states, like, there’s a whole host of services that pharmacists can do. And what rural health tries to do is to give states the opportunity, the incentive and the financial resources to make that happen. Many states are taking this a step further in terms of saying we actually want to connect pharmacies, we want to get them integrated into a national network or state hie, or both to enable them to have more of that data, whether it’s medication history, whether. Whether it’s some of the diagnostics or clinical records for an individual patient. So pharmacists can really just be that much more empowered to do some of those care duties, if you will.

00:12:40 Tony
Right, right. Yeah. I think another thing to think about with the pharmacist is many cases you have more contact with the pharmacist than you do with your provider. And I think between the vaccines, between the medications and other ways you interact with the pharmacist, it’s definitely the last point of contact or first point of contact for many people. I was wondering if you thought about the issue of the independent pharmacies versus the big chains. I know that’s always been something that CMS has been interested in. How do you think all this is going to impact them or to help improve that, or do you think it’ll lead to further consolidation?

00:13:31 Deanne
I’m hopeful that this ends up where we realise that there’s enough pie for everyone. There’s enough opportunity for both the independents as well as the bigger chains. Pharmacists are also under pressure as well as the rest of the healthcare system in terms of workforce supply, access to workforce, and I think there’s enough opportunity, hopefully, for both chain and independent to really thrive. And with some of this Rural health transformation. I know some of the states have a workforce, not just pharmacists, but they’re looking at also training nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, because there just is a lack of supply across the board. And how do we incentivize people to go into those programmes and stay in.

00:14:16 Tony
Those programmes as we move towards more designer based drugs and precision medicine? How do you see the role of the pharmacist evolving with that? Because it becomes more outcomes based and it gets into value based payments and things of that sort. Any thoughts on that?

00:14:38 Deanne
I think that’s an excellent futuristic question. It’s going to be coming up two years ago this summer where ShareScripts and AHIP did a joint convening and we brought in a whole host of payers and providers, the pharmacy associations. And what we really wanted to talk about was value based care arrangements, primarily in the private sector. Insurance. Some Medicaid programmes have done value based care pilots, including pharmacists. And this was an excellent opportunity to look at, you know, what might that future of pharmacy based care look like? I mean, number one, including them in the value based payment chain certainly ups the ante and starts getting pharmacists paid for a lot of the things that quite frankly, during the COVID 19 pandemic they were just doing. 

But it goes beyond that too. And I think with precision medicine and really the opportunity to integrate AI analytics into whether it’s predictive risk scoring on a patient’s personal risk score, or looking at AI incorporated into designing drugs for the future, which is already going, I think there’s just such so much potential there, but the policies are going to have to be right to make it happen. And I think one of the starts for the role of the pharmacist would be getting them recognised in the Medicare programme as a provider of some of this care. There’s been a bill, the last two Congresses, this one and the last one that is called ECAPs, equitable community access to Pharmacist Services that would use Medicare dollars to compensate pharmacists for tests to treat for respiratory conditions. Again, things that they’re already doing. But this would be an important stepping stone to really start looking at. Could we include them in CMMI models moving forward if we had them recognised as this provider for these services? But I’m hopeful. I know this is kind of a tough year, particularly being a midterm election, but we’re hopeful.

00:16:43 Tony
Well, they certainly play a critical role and I think that the work you’re doing at shorescripts will help with that. And hopefully the rural health initiatives will help as well. Because I think as we move further to evolve the healthcare system and AI becomes more and more embedded, the role of the pharmacists will continue to evolve as well. And it’s good to think about how that would fit into the overall, you know, not just operational, but also the payment structures.

00:17:16 Deanne
Absolutely. And I know this is something that I’ve heard Dr. Oz over at CMS talk about the importance of pharmacy services and when you look at the states that have already expanded scope of practise, I’m talking about like Tennessee or Idaho or Alaska. I mean, many of these are the perfect picture of what rural looks like and why pharmacy is so important.

00:17:38 Tony
Absolutely. So I’m going to change a little bit to another area that I know is near and dear to you, Insure scripts and that’s prior authorization and it’s, it’s taken some interesting tax over the past several years. I mean, we’ve had a lot of initiatives in both administrations. We had the prior auth regulation that started under the Trump administration first time and then ended up being coming out towards the end of the Biden administration. We’ve had the whole issue with the pledge and the aligned networks and so. And then of course with Shor Scripts, you had something called touchless prior auth. So I know I’ve thrown out a lot of things in the last 30 seconds, but can you kind of summarise some of your thoughts on this and how. Sure. Scripts is kind of positioning itself as this begins to take greater effect, the changes in prior auth.

00:18:43 Deanne
Sure. Happy to. Fun fact. Our touchless prior auth solution was actually written on the back of, I believe it was a cocktail napkin conversation between some of our technical partners and our technical product leaders here. But the idea was how can we try to make this as automated as possible with the fact that Surescript’s network connects all of the stakeholders involved in that prior auth process for medications, the payers, the providers, the prescribers, the PBMs and most importantly, the patient. We know that prior auth is a tool that we’re just not in a place, I think, in the healthcare system to take all the prior auth requirements off, whether it’s the service or a medication, it can be an important clinical decision support process. But also I think we realise that the friction, the pain points are real and the administration has actually put a draught regulation on e priorthoramads into omb. 

So we know that this regulation is coming. That said, when we wanted to do touchless. The idea was how can we start with the drugs that might be the best opportunities and have some pretty dedicated framework like there’s a standard set of clinical questions that a prescriber needs to answer in order to complete that prior auth. And so the idea was to start with GLP1s and migraine medicines because that might be the easiest to codify the clinical questions at the point of care in the EHR and then to run that through structured and unstructured data into the logic and then return a response within a certain minute timeframe. Because that’s why that’s the idea of touchless and for things that we started with those classes and now I believe we’re up to almost 90 medications included in that touchless cycle and we’re still looking to improve that process and in the future perhaps make some AI enabled logic with the idea though that the human still needs to be in the loop. We’re not going to get into a place where the AI is just running things all by itself without any guidance from a human. But there’s a lot of possibility there. And for those that aren’t, maybe they’re a little bit more complex and they don’t necessarily fit the touchless model. Right now we’re also working on our intelligent prior auth, which is a separate solution. Again also submitting things at the point of care to make this as seamless for the patient and as expedited as possible.

00:21:16 Tony
Great, great. And looking at the CMS work, how do you see that aligning with the ASTP TEFCA effort?

00:21:28 Deanne
I think we’ll see the drug reg built pretty pretty much with the timeframe requirements that CMS 57 did for pre authorization for services. They want to make this as quick as possible to put some regulations on those part. It’ll be part D providers since we’re using a CMS policy lever here. But I do think looking. I know CMS and ASTP are in very close consultation about all the health IT policies and I think in terms of how this works and tefca, you know tbd. I know, I heard Amy Gleason from DOGE CMS speak last week very publicly to the Healthcare Leadership Council members that they are looking to start up a prior authorization workgroup within the CMS Align Network ecosystem, if you will. So I think it gives a lot more opportunity for that public private stakeholder engagement which, you know, kudos to this administration for inviting the outside stakeholders in and really wanting to have those public private conversations. If you will, among the public, private stakeholders. And how do we move the policy forward? Because regulators can regulate, but it’s everybody else who has to live with it too. So I welcome that sort of dialogue.

00:22:45 Tony
Right. And the major levers that CMS always uses are of course, the Medicare programme to some extent Medicaid, somewhat in the marketplace. And I guess the question always becomes is, how is this going to impact the commercial health space?

00:23:06 Deanne
Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. And you know better than I do how many other. You know, I guess they would get Department of Labour involved and start looking under ERISA guidance. But I also think that, you know, putting it in the CMS networks kind of opens up that conversation. If we’re going to do prior AUTH this way for your government lines to business, then you really need to think about just expanding it across all your insured live lines of business.

00:23:37 Tony
Yeah, that was always the theory we, we did when we did that. And, and government business is becoming more and more of a share of the healthcare industry business, particularly when you look at some of the larger chains, or I should say systems, it’s become that way. And, and there has been legislation in Congress to expand prior AUTH regulations or I should say legislation, but I don’t know, it doesn’t seem to have gotten as far as I would have thought it would get by this point. But maybe it can happen by, like you said, the pressure from the government to create a, what we would call, if it’s not a real standard, sometimes de facto standards, but that then can parlay itself into other places where it’s not legislatively mandated.

00:24:34 Deanne
Yeah, I agree with you. And yes, that bill in Congress addressing prior authorization and Medicare has been, I think, three Congresses now. It’s been floating around and.

00:24:42 Tony
Right, exactly.

00:24:43 Deanne
That never quite makes it over the finish line. But now since then we’ve had, you know, CMS 57 finalised and now we’re going to look at what part D for power for drugs looks like. And then, you know, if we’re going to bring it into the aligned network. I almost wonder if, you know, we’re doing, we’re moving the needle with or without that bill, but you know, TBD on that one.

00:25:03 Tony
So I never have a podcast without talking about AI, which of course everybody loves to talk about AI, and AI has different roles depending on what lens you’re looking at. So you’ve kind of alluded to some of the areas where AI is beginning to work its way through into the pharmacy space and other areas of health Care. And then of course, as you mentioned earlier, quantum is, is coming right behind that. So when you combine AI and quantum together, it’s kind of a dawning set of technology coming down the road. But what do you see if you were going to put your crystal ball on for the next several years, what do you see the major impact points, particularly in your area, but even across the health care space?

00:25:57 Deanne
That’s a great question. And a lot of that I think is going to be decided by where we end up in terms of some sort of AI framework in terms of policy and regulation. What I mean by that is to date we really don’t have much of a federal framework on AI, but we have this patchwork of states. And if you’ve seen one state AI framework, you’ve seen one state AI framework. And what I mean is how much does it impact a healthcare use case? Because there’s all kinds of use cases that have been out there and have been subject to discussion, whether it’s facial recognition in law enforcement or is it facial recognition identity verification in health care, same topic, but one has, you know, more concerns about perhaps being used incorrectly and leading to somebody being put in a bad situation versus facial recognition healthcare, we’re just not there yet. It’s coming, we’re working on it. There’s a whole work stream in the CMS aligned network group. 

But I think it’s going to be real clear to delineate between administrative use cases such as automating prior auth, or doing risk adjustments based on your financials or claims processing versus what is an actual healthcare use case and what is the potential for risk and what is the appetite really within the healthcare community for that risk. I’m seeing a lot of states look at regulating chatbots to minors or regulating chatbots as part of a mental health app because there’s concerns that too many can go wrong. I think there’s a lot of use that chatbots can be used for to help automate or to help triage or. Some of my providers now want to use a chatbot to schedule an appointment. Okay, that’s pretty low risk. Either you make the appointment or you don’t. You know, hopefully you got it right. You didn’t over schedule me with three other patients. That’s not going to work. 

But I think that we’re just beginning to see what is going to be 100% grown up AI use cases, if you will, and what might have a problem with innovation trying to thread the needle on these state patchworks. And I know the Administration did a recent executive order where they want to use, you know, the federal agencies, including FTC and DOJ to go look at some state laws. I don’t know if that’s going to survive a legal challenge, I guess tbd, as to whether that executive order stands. But I know there’s a consensus that we just need some regulatory clarity on this if we’re really going to innovate and not have to be concerned about compliance across an ever growing list of states.

00:28:39 Tony
Yeah, it’s a challenge. I’ve been looking, working with some folks at the state of Maryland is really looking at AI more from a consumer and scam standpoint. But one of the things I’ve said to them is, you know, if we can’t get national policy, at least try to work with other states to come up with kind of, you know, similar language and certainly similar types of, of regulations where it makes sense. Because like you said, from the, from the standpoint of the industry, it creates a lot of problems. The question I guess that I was going to ask you in this area to kind of follow up from a standpoint of AI helping people make health care decisions or give them information from a medication standpoint, that can be very challenging. So if you go to, you know, one of the major AI companies, OpenAI or Google with Gemini or some of the other ones, Claude with Anthropic, that’s where it’s kind of. How do you see that kind of playing out? Because there’s potential for great help in education, but there’s also potential for people getting answers that may not be correct and could cause harm.

00:30:14 Deanne
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a fascinating question. And I could compare it to a situation that, you know, I have a family, family member who is on a number of different medications. And right now there’s this process going on trying to figure out taking away one and substituting with another. And how does that affect everything else? And there’s a number of different way, you know, clinicians that you could go to to get that pharmacy comes to mind. And I actually told this family member, you might want to cheque with the pharmacist because all these meds are not prescribed by the same clinician. So when you go to these different specialists, they’re just seeing this.

00:30:51 Tony
Right.

00:30:52 Deanne
Whereas the pharmacist can see, you know, the medication management, the medication reconciliation. And I do think that is something where AI can play a greater role. I think the importance is going to be, again, human in the loop, because what you alluded to, I Would hate to be on the receiving end of a hallucination in terms of your agentic AI. And a mistake could be deadly. So I think that’s where having really solid development with really solid industry accredited standards that are out there and recognised and also having humans in the loop. And what’s that, what’s that final review process before something is giving somebody incorrect information? Not intentionally. It just, you know, humans give incorrect information necessarily not intentionally. But you know, how do we, how do we make sure that the machines, decisions and outputs are as good as they possibly can be with humans overseeing that, that whole decision tree logic, if you will.

00:31:51 Tony
Well, even a trusted pharmacy AI site might be helpful too as opposed to somebody just going out and putting a bunch of medications that they take into chat, GPT or one of the other ones and saying give me some feedback on how these interact with me.

00:32:12 Deanne
Right, right. And also the privacy aspects. The average consumer may not be using the healthcare HIPAA accredited version of those, you know, decision model, decision agents and that, that can be a very big concern as well.

00:32:28 Tony
Yeah, and I think this conversation we’ve talked about is really kind of leading into my next question, Dan, and that’s you’ve been involved in health policy and technology for many years and what we just talked about, the changes that technology’s producing, whether it’s AI or whether it’s, you know, in the future, quantum, even blockchain does have a role. I mean obviously not the way it looked like, but, but even outside of that there’s a lot of different things that are evolving as the industry changes and consolidates. And so what it feels like to me at the federal level it’s very hard to get health policy change rapidly. It always has been, but even now more. And that of course leads to states kind of trying to step in which as you pointed out creates a patchwork. So what, where do you see that we’re going to go in the next few years? You mentioned privacy. I mean we know that privacy is, is way out of date. The privacy, whether it’s hipaa, the Privacy act or other, other privacy legislation, regulations. So what do you think? If you and I were going to have this conversation five years from now, what things do we need kind of do in the next five years to help keep policies relevant and you know, effective now?

00:34:02 Deanne
A great question. And as a personal aside, I’ve been working on privacy for almost last eight years, formerly when I was at Change Healthcare and then here at Source Scripts. And it is personally frustrating to me that we still do not have a federal data privacy framework for this country. And I know it’s frustrating to many others as well. And in the interim, we’ve had state privacy laws that touch on HIPAA non regulated health data in different ways and it is a total source of frustration for compliance departments. And I also would just say the other issue is we need a federal privacy framework if we’re really going to do meaningful cybersecurity legislation, regulation on the federal level, AI legislation, regulation on the federal level, and data interoperability. I always look at those as like they’re the four siblings and they’re all connected.

00:34:56 Tony
Absolutely.

00:34:57 Deanne
So how do we get there? Again, I’m hopeful this Congress, we do have some leadership coming out of Senate help with legislation on this issue. I think it’s really, you know, anyone who says they can predict what’s happening in Congress this year, I’d love to meet that person and see if we end up at that same place in December, because I just think that it’s pretty unpredictable right now in terms of what gets done on the Hill. But I’m very hopeful that hopefully we just need to realise that without a federal privacy framework, it’s really hard to do all the other things. Right. And we are the only developed country in the world that does not have a national data privacy framework at the level our country is at. And it’s one of those things that it doesn’t really matter until maybe it affects you or someone you care about, or their data being found on the dark web or what have you, because we don’t have concise federal policies. But I’m hopeful and I can’t really tell you what’s going to happen in five years on this issue because it’s been so long in the making. But I do know I will be very personally disappointed if five years from now we’re still in the same place.

00:36:09 Tony
Yeah, I would, I would hope not. I mean, it really is a, a problem and it hasn’t gotten any better. It’s getting worse all the time. And, and in the absence of, you know, Congress or the White House or both, preferably taking this to, to the point where they push it over the finish line. It’s, it’s going to be a lot of talk and, and bills, but, you know, that doesn’t mean anything because the technology and changes in business are happening a lot faster than people can talk through a session about something.

00:36:49 Deanne
Yeah, there was a great inaugural programme this fall that the Healthcare Trust Institute put on. It was in Palm Springs, California and there was Every single topic that was discussed, every single panel focused, focused on privacy, AI, cybersecurity, data interoperability and how all of these issues are framed up. And that group has been definitely advocating for why we need a federal privacy framework. And we spend a lot of time as a coalition educating folks on the Hill. And I just hope that, like I said, we get it over this year, but this has just been something that just absolutely needs to happen in the interim of no federal privacy framework. You’re kind of stuck. Like, okay, wearables. I just got smart scale the other week. It’s fascinating. All of this is just going to proliferate at record, you know, record speed and it’s just again, governed by whatever state you happen to live in or wherever your data’s going. Yeah, it’s up to that state law.

00:37:47 Tony
Right. And the problem with that is it just puts the states more and more separate entities as opposed to being under a, a federation that will create national standards that we can all live by. And that doesn’t. Well, like I said, it hurts compliance offices, but it also ultimately hurts the patients and all of us in this country.

00:38:12 Deanne
No, absolutely. And I don’t know if the average patient even understands, you know, state data privacy laws or hipaa, non HIPAA data. So I mean, if they can’t, those are just very complex things. I don’t even know like where my health data stands outside of HIPAA with respect to all the state privacy laws. I would need a, I would need to go pull up my cheat sheet document and figure that out for a minute.

00:38:35 Tony
Yeah, no, and, and you’re right. And this gets back to what we talked about a few moments ago about the role of health literacy and the lack of it and, and the role that pharmacists and others can play maybe in helping people even in something like the privacy area, to help them understand better.

00:38:56 Deanne
Right, absolutely. Yeah. In fact, Privacy is one of the discussion groups within the CMS alliance network, which is great. But again, you know, not to beat the horse, but we’re going to come back to that need for that federal level framework.

00:39:11 Tony
Yeah, well, there’s a lot of talking, but we need action.

00:39:15 Deanne
Absolutely.

00:39:17 Tony
Well, we’ve talked about a lot in the last 40 minutes or so, Dan, and so I want to a couple questions just to kind of finalise our discussion today. One is just flipping to the personal side. What keeps you busy when you aren’t thinking about healthcare policy?

00:39:36 Deanne
Yeah, well, that’s a lot. Good question. It’s a lot. I am a longtime volunteer with A dog rescue organisation. So that’s something that I spend some time on. And I’m also on the board of the alliance of Wound Care Stakeholders. So it’s kind of an association of associations, if you will, as well as wound care manufacturers, wound care provider clinics, and that takes up some of my time as well. But you know, talking about me choosing not to become a doctor, it was pretty funny when two years ago I went to my first wound care conference and having got onto hymns and all the health IT conferences my entire career, you know, you go, you’re used to an exhibit hall where you see fun, flashy things and you know, new technology. Now of course it’s robots and all the AI enabled stuff. Well, this conference which I had only been to, this is my first time, you look up and they’re serving lunch in the exhibit hall and there’s some pretty graphic pictures of all the different kind of wounds up on the exhibit hall displays. And I remember us talking to our board chair and I said, I don’t know how you serve food in here with all you’re surrounded by. This imagery goes, oh, you get used to it. I said, well, I guess you do. I’m not.

00:40:49 Tony
Well, okay.

00:40:52 Deanne
And that just kind of reminded me like, yeah, okay. I guess if you’re a clinician and that’s who’s there and that’s who you’re selling to, of course you’re going to get used to it. It’s just. Oh, it was, it was, it was an eye opener.

00:41:02 Tony
Right, I’m sure that’s funny. So what, where can people go to learn more about these? Where are there. Some go to websites, blogs, podcasts or other types of media that you even old fashioned print that you recommend to people to go to to learn more about some of the topics besides the Shore Scripts website, of course.

00:41:26 Deanne
Oh, well, thank you. Yes, we do have a podcast series at Sourscript called A Better Way. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that. But of course in terms of publications and I admit I don’t get any paper delivered to my house, it’s just more for me to take out to the recycling bin each week. I, I enjoy Stat News and Politico and Axios. I also follow Punchbowl News on Twitter. They’re very generous with their information out of Punchbowl News if you’re looking for that. What’s going on in Congress, in the Hill. As far as podcasts, I like KFF’s what the Health. I like the heart of Healthcare, which is also getting into startups and investing as well as just bigger trends in healthcare. And I will say, like, there’s a lot of podcasts I listen to that aren’t on topic. Sometimes I just listen to podcasts as a change pace from all the other things. I don’t listen to any news podcast or the one I mentioned because I don’t want people talking at me in the news these days. I have to read it for my own sanity.

00:42:28 Tony
Yep, yep, I understand that completely. Sometimes you, you have to turn off or tune out just to kind of keep your sanity.

00:42:38 Deanne
Right. I can only have so much talking in my ears per day of, you know, heavy topics. I need something a little lighter at some point during the day.

00:42:44 Tony
Yep, I agree. So just a couple quick response questions and I probably know the answer to this first one. What, what’s been the biggest disappointment for you in healthcare policy over the last 10 years?

00:42:57 Deanne
I say all the data topics, starting with privacy framework and also interoperability. You know, back in the meaningful use days, I think there was a lot of us who had a lot of hope and expectation that we’d eventually get to a place. And I applaud this administration for putting together this public private sector partnership of CMS aligned networks to have that conversation and not necessarily come out of the gate with heavy regulation. But I’m disappointed and yet hopeful for the next ten years.

00:43:28 Tony
Right, right. That’s good. So what do you think has been the most significant improvement in health policy you’ve seen over the last 10 years?

00:43:36 Deanne
Great question. I think the, you know, they had to do it by regulation and before that legislation, but I think the greater focus on transparency of healthcare prices, what things cost, whether it’s with insurance, without insurance, particularly now, especially drug prices, it’s really the only thing that we spend money on that we just don’t know at the time of service what we’re going to end up paying. You kind of argue your electric bill might be the same thing right now.

00:44:03 Tony
But I would definitely agree with that.

00:44:07 Deanne
Yeah, but that’s, there’s a lot less variation. Right. It’s one bill. You know what you’re getting. It’s electricity, health care. There is all kinds of things that you can be requiring, whether it’s service or medication. So I applaud that. We’ve, we’ve got a start. There’s still a way to go on that, as we’ve seen with all the legislation on all the different topics this year, about greater transparency in different places of the healthcare industry.

00:44:32 Tony
Yeah. Well, we could do a whole nother podcast about that. I agree with you for sure.

00:44:38 Deanne
Yeah. There’s no lack of everybody being examined as to how can you contribute to better price transparency for the patient. I mean, I think everybody has a role to play there.

00:44:49 Tony
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Deanne, thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. I thought it was a great podcast. We hit on a lot of points and best of luck to you and Surescripts.

00:45:01 Deanne
Thank you. Tony. Thanks for the opportunity and the discussion. I enjoyed it.

00:45:05 Tony
Great. Thanks.