340B 2020
An Update on the Evolving Market and a First Look at Contract Pharmacy Performance

Market Landscape: Macro Helix, Sentry, Verity Solutions Tackling Challenges of Largest, Most Complex Organizations

PharmaForce & Verity Solutions Lead Customer Satisfaction through Attentive Account Management

Account managers are often the information highway helping customers realize savings and optimize processes and technology. PharmaForce and Verity Solutions (both leaders in offering 340B managed services) have driven high customer satisfaction by ensuring their account managers have deep knowledge and experience in 340B. This knowledge is leveraged to both guide customers and also communicate their requests back to the vendor to ensure development addresses client needs. This alignment leads to strong value. Notably, Verity Solutions has managed to maintain this strong account management with many large customers; PharmaForce customers tend to be smaller, with fewer acute care covered entities. Both vendors’ customers report attentive, knowledgeable executives. PharmaForce customers also mention that during the implementation, their account managers helped make sure they were prepared for potential HRSA audits.

Macro Helix Improves Self-Serve Reporting; RxStrategies Customers Experience Reporting Issues in New Platform

Macro Helix Customers See Significant Improvement in HRSA Audit Preparedness

Thanks to development efforts, Macro Helix’s reporting has become flexible and extensive enough that customers can find the data they need to prepare for and perform well in HRSA audits. RxStrategies customers can get what they need eventually but sometimes have to wait on the vendor to pull data for them. Sentry and PSG customers need a greater breadth of reports to be more self-sufficient for HRSA audits.

Unexpected Costs Erode PSG & Sentry Customers’ Confidence

Both PSG and Sentry customers frequently encounter unexpected costs—often during or after the implementation, when what was delivered is insufficient to meet clients’ needs and additional purchases are needed. This diminishes perceived value and results in PSG and Sentry being the least likely vendors to be recommended by interviewed customers. For Sentry users, these frustrations, along with poor delivery of new technology, have mounted to the point that one-quarter of respondents (out of 67 interviewed) say Sentry is not part of their long-term plans. PSG customers report recent improvements in account management, leading to hope that the vendor can right the ship regarding extra costs and other issues, such as buggy updates that don’t fully address client needs (e.g., the need for more ad hoc reporting). PSG was recently acquired by Omnicell; it is too early to tell what impact this will have on the customer experience.

Contract Pharmacy Management

Walgreens & Wellpartner Meeting Basic Needs

Contract pharmacy vendors often have preferred relationships with certain retailers or specialty pharmacies, so provider organizations have somewhat limited options for contract pharmacy management. Walgreens (does not offer split-billing software) and Wellpartner (used very infrequently for split billing) are meeting clients’ basic contract pharmacy needs, though with room for improvement (see details below). The other vendors, who also offer split-billing software, perform similarly in this space as they do in general 340B management. For a high-level view of the contract pharmacy vendors used most often by respondents, see the table below.

About This Report

Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. These interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation, and the scores and commentary collected are shared in reports like this one and online in real time so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from their peers’ experiences. To enable readers to more quickly understand high-level differences in vendor performance and give better context as to how each product compares to other offerings in the market, KLAS has organized the questions from the standard evaluation into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.

To supplement the data gathered with this standard evaluation, KLAS also creates various supplemental evaluations that target a subset of KLAS’ overall sampling and delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing healthcare technology today.

The data in this report comes from both evaluation types and was collected over the last 12 months; the number of unique responding organizations for each is given in the chart below.

What Does “Limited Data” Mean? 

Some products are used in only a small number of facilities, some vendors are resistant to providing client lists, and some respondents choose not to answer particular questions. Thus a vendor’s sample size may vary from question to question and may not reach KLAS’ required threshold of 15 unique respondents. When a vendor’s sample size for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.

Overall scores are measured on a 100-point scale and represent the weighted average of several yes/no questions as well as other questions scored on a 9-point scale.