Why FDB Sees Room for Competition in E-Prescribing Market

This year, FDB has launched its own network called FDB Vela (pronounced Vee-la), which it describes as “a cloud-native electronic prescribing network that enables the seamless flow of critical medication prescription information, benefits verification, and clinical decision support between prescribers, payers, pharmacies, and other constituents.” FirstDatabank is known for its well-adopted drug database, and Bigler noted that through this work, FDB already engages all the stakeholders in the e-prescribing process. “We work with almost all of the EHR systems, pharmacy benefit managers, payers, pharmacy retailers and pharmacy systems, so we're already very much involved and engaged in that process from a drug database perspective,” he said. “What's interesting is that as we began to engage with those customers and stakeholders around how we at FDB can provide more value to them, they actually brought up e-prescribing as a topic on several occasions.

“But e-prescribing hasn't fundamentally changed in terms of the value that it may bring to certain stakeholders, be it providers, be at pharmacies, be it patients and consumers. On average, what we're gathering is that the regular specialty prescription could take up to 24 days to be filled because of the friction and the red tape, so we're really focused on driving automation innovation in terms of APIs and leveraging AI technology to be able to bring that down to much less than 24 days.” I think there are a lot of different ways we are willing to work with EHRs to improve their workflow process and how they inject information that brings better workflow and streamlines decision-making.” “I think you'll see a few announcements with top five EHR systems, working with our Vela platform, and we'll also see some very large pharmacy systems and large PBMs participating,” he replied. What we're focused on is enabling the veterinarian community to participate in e-prescribing so that they can access retail pharmacies as well and start to manage their prescriptions better for their pet patients, which really improves the workflow experience.”