Presenters at AMCP Nexus 2021 emphasized data collection, interventions tailored toward individuals, and other strategies payers and providers can take to reduce racial disparities in medication adherence and boost Star Ratings.

Sharon K Jhawar, PharmD, MBA, BCGP, chief pharmacy officer at SCAN Health Plan, and Timshel Tarbet, MBA, BSP, CCP, vice president of Business Excellence and Diversity Strategy at SCAN Health Plan, shared their insights on how to reduce inequities in medication adherence among older adults. SCAN Health Plan is a Medicare Advantage organization in California with over 200,000 beneficiaries.

The presenters emphasized gathering data beyond what is provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Dr Jhawar noted that having more specific information on patient subgroups enables organizations to “dig deeper down into the data and understand what some of the inequities are, and then start to address them at that level.”

Dr Jhawar also stressed the importance of bridging gaps between provider and patient beliefs about health, meeting members where they are, and building trust. SCAN utilized ethnographic interviews to gather qualitative information and understand how individual patients interacted with their providers as well as the larger health care system.

“You can’t just look at the data,” Ms Tarbet said. “You have to understand some of the underlying impact of what’s going on from a systemic standpoint and how individuals are able to comfortably engage with the systems that they need to get their health information.”

Other interventions included cultural humility training and pairing members with staff who were of the same cultural or linguistic background.

SCAN’s cultural humility training followed the Skills-based ASCN Model (“Ask, Share, Compare, and Negotiate”) developed by the University of Arizona, so that staff could better understand different cultures and health care norms.

“The whole essence of this is that we should be asking about the health care beliefs and behaviors of the person we’re helping, we should know our own…and our implicit biases that we have, and then compare both views and work on a tailored treatment plan with the person to lead them to better health,” Dr Jhawar explained.

Making sure members are informed about pharmacy benefits, such as mail-order services and 3-month medication supply options can also improve adherence, they said. They also recommended partnering with providers to offer them more specific data that can inform their interactions with patients and improve member knowledge about medications and treatment plans.

Dr Jhawar and Ms Tarbet encouraged member follow-up and measuring outcomes, not only to ensure intervention efficacy, but to continuously provide patients the opportunity to engage with the health care system in an informative, personalized way.

“We keep tweaking, learning, and then pivoting again, because there really is no silver bullet on how to reduce the inequities that we see,” Dr Jhawar said. “Our effort is to [get] the whole entire ecosystem thinking about the cultural beliefs of every person that we’re helping in their health care journey.”