Payers Adopt Initiatives to Address ‘Pharmacoequity’

For the past couple of years, payers have been focusing more attention on health inequities related to race, income and other factors by hiring staff and investing money in programs to improve access to care and lower costs. More recently, they have adopted similar strategies to address inequities in the pharmacy side of their businesses, according to health plan executives who spoke at a conference last month at the University of Pittsburgh.

The push among payers is known as “pharmacoequity,” a term popularized by Utibe Essien, M.D., an internal medicine physician and assistant professor at UCLA. Essien, who moderated the panel with the payer executives, defines pharmacoequity as “equity in access to pharmacotherapies or ensuring that all patients, regardless of race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or availability of resources, have access to the highest quality of pharmacotherapy required to manage their health conditions.”