3 Ways ‘Data with Purpose’ Is Shaping Patient Care

Prior authorizations approved in seconds. Up-to-date medication histories that boost value-based care coordination. And real money saved on prescriptions.

Limited patient access, high costs, workflow inefficiencies, and fragmented health data plague U.S. healthcare. But these longstanding challenges aren’t insurmountable. In fact, our 2024 Annual Impact Report shows how the Surescripts Network Alliance is working together across healthcare to meet and overcome them.

The sense I get after reading the report is that we are meeting these challenges. We are overcoming them. And we’re doing it by what I call “data with purpose.”

Let me show you what I mean.

1. Prior authorization for medication approved in seconds: Our work on Touchless Prior Authorization with Optum Rx and Cleveland Clinic led to 88% fewer appeals and 68% fewer denials, with average approval times of less than 30 seconds. Browse through this white paper to go in-depth on these results.
2. Medication history for value-based care: Baptist Health Louisville enabled faster, more targeted interventions and a boost to medication adherence with Medication History for Populations, which provides timely, accurate data about dispensed medication for care coordination. This is how patient outreach gets more efficient.
3. Real money saved on prescriptions: Greenway Health helped its patients save $57.77 on average per prescription with Real-Time Prescription Benefit. Nationwide, patients saved an average of $82 (and more than $1,000 for specialty medications) in 2024. See the benefits of optimizing prescriptions up front.

These examples illustrate what I mean by “data with purpose,” which isn’t about information for its own sake. Data alone doesn’t solve problems. It’s about using data—timely, actionable, transformative data—to help patients and the providers who care for them.

Data with purpose is delivered when it can make a difference, enabling quick prior authorization approvals before the patient has even left the clinic. It’s organized in a way that empowers care managers to help patients stick to their treatment plans. And it yields meaningful outcomes like more affordable prescriptions.

In other words, data with purpose goes from insight to impact.

Together as the Surescripts Network Alliance, we’re empowering the healthcare ecosystem with intelligence and clinical interoperability that improves prescribing, prior authorization, treatment, care management and more.