Food Retailer Giant Eagle Selects EmpiRx Health as PBM

Giant Eagle, a food and pharmacy retailer, has selected the PBM EmpiRx Health to manage the pharmacy benefits of its employees. Giant Eagle operates more than 200 pharmacies throughout Western Pennsylvania, North Central Ohio, Northern West Virginia, Maryland, and Indiana.

The companies are working together to create a national network of pharmacy chains and benefits plan sponsors, according to a news release. The new network aims to improve patient health outcomes and address rising prescription drug costs.

This follows an announcement by EmpiRx Health of the launch of AllyRx, a national pharmacy care network built specifically for pharmacy and grocery retailers. AllyRx provides PBM services and solutions to help retailers improve their employees’ health outcomes while reducing prescription drug costs.

EmpiRx Health worked closely with pharmacy leaders, including those at Giant Eagle, to create AllyRx. AllyRx will leverage EmpiRx Health’s pharmacist-centric service model and AI-powered technology platform to manage pharmacy benefits for pharmacy and grocery chains.

A spokesperson for EmpiRx said AllyRx was created in response to the needs expressed by pharmacy and grocery chain leaders to have a PBM partner who supports community pharmacies. “In addition, in our many discussions with pharmacy and grocery industry leaders, they were fully aligned with EmpiRx Health’s patient-first approach that focuses on improving health outcomes by putting pharmacists at the center of the PBM service model,” the spokesperson said. “The new AllyRx network will leverage EmpiRx Health’s patient-centric, pharmacist-led operating model, which is supported by EmpiRx Health’s AI-powered technology platform and proprietary population health engine.

Related: EmpiRx Health to Scale Its Value-Driven Pharmacy Program

EmpiRx Health has created a population management engine that helps clients target a clinical strategy in almost real-time for that client’s patient population. The PBM uses the Johns Hopkins ACG System, which is population health analytics software that uses diagnosis, pharmacy and lab data, and big data tools. The information and insight the system produces can be used in population health, patient care, finance and budgeting, and performance analysis.

The ACG system can create a risk profile, both clinical and financial, for its clients. The company then wraps its own AI around the ACG model to bring clinical evidence and personal risk factors such as comorbidities into the picture and creates a profile for each patient within a group.

This allows for pharmacists at EmpiRx to focus on patients who might need clinical intervention to address safety or effectiveness outcomes with patients’ physicians. Instead of using a restrictive formulary, the PBM provides an open formulary. Its pharmacists are able to recommend alternative drug dosing options or lower-cost medications that address patient health outcomes.

This is important, company executives said, with high-cost specialty drugs. Specialty medicines will represent 43% of global spending by 2028 and more than 55% of total spending in leading developed markets like the United States, according to a report last year from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.

EmpiRx executives said they have an 88% engagement with physicians, a 93% medication adherence rate, and a 64% therapeutic switch rate.