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April 18, 2025
For Hope Hospice, prescribing habits were… fine. Not bad. Not great.
An affiliate of Chapters Health System, Hope Hospice, based in Fort Myers, Florida, was looking for ways to optimize their ordering habits — particularly for drugs that could be deprescribed or that have effective lower-cost alternatives. They also wanted data and a process that would bring more information directly to everyone in the process.
“I was looking for ways to reduce medication spend and help identify trends and opportunities for controlling per-patient-day pharmacy costs for hospice patients,” says Dr. Tara Friedman, Chief Medical Officer at Chapters. “I also wanted something that was in the hands of the prescribers to allow them to make informed decisions.”
That’s when Hope Hospice’s pharmacy partner OnePoint Patient Care told them about MyMetRx. Pronounced “My Metrics,” MyMetRx is a collaborative process between hospices and OnePoint, helping hospices identify the right, affordable medications for all patients.
“We weren’t fully utilizing the reporting capabilities that they had available, so OnePoint showed me MyMetRx and I was just really impressed,” Friedman says. “We work with several different PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers) and the amazing thing about MyMetRx is it is just so user-friendly.”
Perhaps the biggest benefit to MyMetRx, Friedman says, is the timeliness of its data. Analytics providers always focus on real-time data, but “real-time” has a different meaning in hospice.
“MyMetRx provides information that’s much more actionable than some of our other reports, because if you get information about something that happened a month or two ago, that patient is likely not even with you anymore,” Friedman says. The reality of hospice is that adjusting meds for a patient only works if providers are receiving data quickly — within days, not weeks.
“You can try to learn the lesson and then try to apply that lesson to the next patient, but that doesn’t always stick,” she says.
“We work hand in hand with hospice to set a baseline of various different deprescribing and substitution metrics when you enroll with MyMetRx and then constantly give updates so you can track your progress,” says Joe Solien, Vice President of Clinical Services at OnePoint Patient Care. “In the last couple of months, we’ve reduced these avoidable prescriptions by 95%, which is truly incredible.”
When Hope Hospice started working with MyMetRx, they were ordering more than 500 such avoidable prescriptions per month. At the end of March, OnePoint delivered a revised prescription list to Hope Hospice. The new count: nine.
“Which is amazing,” Friedman says. “Because with 800 patients on a program, that’s a lot of discipline.”
Friedman knows that one of the biggest challenges for hospice providers is to know how to get the best bang for their buck on medications. MyMetRx unleashed those insights.
“We really implemented MyMetRx to help get better insight into where we were spending and then be able to make more informed decisions about how we could get those costs under control,” she says.
The challenge, Solien notes, is straightforward.
“Clinicians have a million things to remember,” he says. MyMetRx keeps the actionable, impactful information right in front of them, with OnePoint providing regular reviews. “They’re going to have fresh information that only looks back a week or two at patients.”
Implementation was fast. “It was a very effective intervention with our team,” Friedman says. “Within one year, we were at 95% reduction.”
Solien credits the Hope Hospice team for doing the work required to get such outstanding results.
“To Joe’s point, it can’t just be the medical director sitting in their office,” Friedman says. “In our program, it took the medical director and our regional directors of nursing together to own it and champion it. We discussed it with our doctors. I discussed it with the doctors and nurse practitioners and our nursing leaders also discussed it with their nurses. Everyone knew it was happening and everyone was partnered and trying to make it happen.”