Why do most of North American Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) like you depend on First DataBank to help improve care and lower the cost of prescription drugs?
The answer lies in your absolute reliance on high-quality drug information. Consider how a comprehensive, logically organized drug database—containing the most trusted and up-to-date pricing and clinical information—contributes to three operations at the heart of your daily workflow.
Claims Processing and Adjudication: Rapid access to a powerful drug data base is essential to your continued ability to efficiently process and adjudicate claims.
Drug Formulary Management: You may be managing thousands of customized member formularies. The same powerful drug database and tools used for claims processing provide you with:
- Clear business and clinical indicators that support informed decisions about brand versus generic drug status
- A process for grouping products that allows you to determine exclusions or preferred products
- The ability to create options for product selection—tiered co-pays, preferred product lists, step therapy—that encourage more cost-conscious behavior in both providers and patients
Pharmacy Dispensing: You may be assuming a larger role in dispensing prescription drugs, largely through mail-order pharmacies. Proven reliable drug information enables you to help patients avoid adverse drug events, improve clinical outcomes, and reduce costs.
Of course, drug information is also essential to disease- and rebate-management programs; to data-mining functions that provide insights into prescriber and customer behavior; to web portals; and to other aspects of how PBMs function.
Moreover, the importance of drug data will continue to grow. Advances like e-prescribing already demand that information flow back and forth at extraordinary speeds and with pinpoint accuracy among clinicians, PBMs, and retail pharmacies.
Essential Building Blocks
For over 25 years, First DataBank has set the standard in providing context-relevant drug information for the point of need. We listen carefully to the issues of virtually all stakeholders, and then partner with information system developers to deliver proven drug databases for efficient integration into a wide range of applications all across the healthcare continuum.
Our National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) is the leader in supplying comprehensive coverage of descriptive, pricing and clinical information on drugs. It encompasses medications approved by the FDA, plus commonly used over-the-counter drugs and information on herbals, nutraceuticals, dietary supplements, and medical devices.
Comprehensive and up-to-date are the key concepts here, since drug content is dynamic and notoriously complex to maintain. It's essential, therefore, that the drug database behind PBM applications be the most reliable in the industry. NDDF Plus is that database. It also offers you the most efficient ways of navigating to exactly the information you need for the task at hand, allowing for more informed decision-making, fewer medication errors and increased patient safety.
First DataBank also provides Multiple Access Points, basic drug identifiers that enable users to zero in on First DataBank drug information quickly and efficiently within their normal workflow. And you can take advantage of First DataBank's proprietary Enhanced Therapeutic Classification™ system to build or revise your formularies at as general or specific a level as necessary.
Our clinical modules for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions and other clinical decision support offer exceptionally flexible ways for you to create applications that categorize and display potentially harmful interactions. First DataBank's dedicated clinical staff separates the interactions into highly granular categories, and then carefully and consistently creates subsets of the most clinically relevant drug interactions. This reduces "noise" that less relevant interactions create, and eliminates the need for clinicians to spend undue time researching alerts.
First DataBank Medical Lexicon is a specialized medical vocabulary relating drug products to various diagnoses and health-related concepts in our disease decision-support and dosing modules.
Our Tall Man Plus database helps prevent dispensing errors caused by look-alike and sound-alike drug product names. It accommodates bar-code solutions by enabling developers to link drug product Universal Product Codes with National Drug Code (NDC) identifiers.
