Sharon Jhawar, Chief Pharmacy Officer at SCAN Health Plan, said the organization researched their health plans to figure out what inequities existed in their members. What stood out was that their quality was lower for Black members and they weren't meeting their needs. They also saw in medication adherence, a significantly lower percentage of their Hispanic and Black members who were non-adherent. With the help of AI and cultural matching patients with physicians, they have noticed the improvement of adherence from their patients.
Sharon Jhawar, chief pharmacy officer at SCAN Health Plan, spoke at the annual AMCP meeting in San Antonio this week about the unfortunate relationship between medication adherence and racial health disparities.
One solution to this problem is matching members to conditions and physicians with a shared culture and language.
"The language side, it's easier to understand, right? If someone is speaking the language that you are familiar with, you're more likely to understand how to take care of your health and what they're telling you," Jhawar said. "On the cultural side, what we found was that if someone can relate to you better and understand you better because they share the same background. In this case, whether, if I'm Black and I'm speaking to one of my Black members, I have deeper insights."
What SCAN found from their research was a lot of trust was built.
"People opened up about why they weren't taking their medications, and then we could better help them," she said. "So, the shared culture and language together, we found was instrumental in helping both our Black and Hispanic members kind of get on a better path with taking their medications."
Specialty Drugs Dominate Pharmaceutical Frontier in 2025
April 15th 2025In a Q&A with Jeff Casberg, MS, RPh, senior vice president of clinical pharmacy services at IPD Analytics, Casberg explains the evolution of specialty drugs, the future of GLP-1 competition and what to expect from the traditional drug pipeline.
Read More
340B Program Is Driving Up Costs and Needs Urgent Reform | AMCP Annual 2025
April 7th 2025At the 2025 AMCP annual meeting in Houston from March 31 to April 3, John M. O'Brien, Pharm.D., MPH, president and CEO of the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), shared concerns and potential reforms in a conversation with Managed Healthcare Executive.
Read More
Exploring the Wide World of GLP-1s | AMCP Annual 2025
April 3rd 2025Originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1s) are now being studied to explore their effects on various other conditions, such as sleep apnea, substance use disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, according to panelists participating in a keynote session of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy annual meeting today in Houston.
Read More
Specialty Drugs Dominate Pharmaceutical Frontier in 2025
April 15th 2025In a Q&A with Jeff Casberg, MS, RPh, senior vice president of clinical pharmacy services at IPD Analytics, Casberg explains the evolution of specialty drugs, the future of GLP-1 competition and what to expect from the traditional drug pipeline.
Read More
340B Program Is Driving Up Costs and Needs Urgent Reform | AMCP Annual 2025
April 7th 2025At the 2025 AMCP annual meeting in Houston from March 31 to April 3, John M. O'Brien, Pharm.D., MPH, president and CEO of the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), shared concerns and potential reforms in a conversation with Managed Healthcare Executive.
Read More
Exploring the Wide World of GLP-1s | AMCP Annual 2025
April 3rd 2025Originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes, glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1s) are now being studied to explore their effects on various other conditions, such as sleep apnea, substance use disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, according to panelists participating in a keynote session of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy annual meeting today in Houston.
Read More
2 Commerce Drive
Cranbury, NJ 08512