There's a pivotal moment in most patient visits when a prescription is written and a treatment journey begins. For pharmaceutical manufacturers, that moment represents years of research, development, and regulatory reviews finally reaching the patient. However, fragmented clinical workflows often raise significant specialty medication barriers that add to provider burnout.
Understanding how actionable support works is essential for anyone with a stake in whether patients start and stay on prescribed specialty therapies.is essential for anyone with a stake in whether patients start and stay on prescribed therapies.
Most physicians run into hundreds of EHR alerts in a typical week. Drug-drug interactions, allergy warnings, formulary reminders, dosing flags—the list goes on. The problem isn’t that alerts exist. It’s that most of them fire indiscriminately, interrupting a workflow that’s already under a time crunch.
When 81% of physicians report being overwhelmed by alert volume, meaningful information needed to navigate specialty medication barriers gets lost in the static. Information that doesn’t earn its place in that moment gets dismissed—and dismissed information doesn’t help patients. In fact, among the physicians who said alert volume was exhausting, 68% said the high number of notifications caused them to lose focus and 55% routinely dismissed alerts without reading them thoroughly.
“If a notification isn’t actionable, it’s just noise—an interruption that breaks my brain and my workflow, says Colin Banas, M.D., M.H.A., and Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst. “The second I have to leave the screen to hunt for context or re-enter data, the game is lost. Think of it like the lines on a road: they’re there to guide you and keep you safe, but they never take the steering wheel out of the clinician’s hands."
Actionable support is the antidote to alert fatigue. Instead of interrupting prescribers with generic warnings, it pulls through the right information—specific to the patient, the payer, and the drug being prescribed—at the right moment in the prescribing workflow. And it’s delivered in a way that supports the decision rather than complicating it.
The gap between clinical intent and what’s required to get a prescription filled has widened significantly due to the specialty pipeline explosion. GLP-1s, biologics, and other specialty drugs account for a massive share of new prescriptions, complicating prior authorization (PA) processes and introducing special handling and distribution requirements.
The typical EHR clinical workflow wasn’t built to navigate this complexity. Providers have reached a tipping point where the manual effort needed to overcome specialty medication barriers is burning out staff and delaying patient care.
The combination creates both urgency and opportunity. The question is whether the tools being built change the prescribing process or add another frustrating layer to it.
Currently, most prescribers are flying blind on several fronts, including:
The downstream effects of these information gaps are concrete: 27% of written prescriptions go unfilled due to payer rejections and patient abandonment. This isn’t a failure of patient intention. Rather, it reflects decisions that weren’t supported adequately at the point of prescribing.
Patient support programs, copay assistance, and education resources are designed to reduce these barriers. However, they can only work if prescribers know they exist, and patients are connected to them before they arrive at the pharmacy counter.
The problem is that a prescriber writing a specialty prescription often doesn’t know in the moment if PA is needed, what clinical documentation the payer needs, or whether the medical or pharmacy benefit applies. The result is a prescription that leaves the office without the information needed to fulfill it, which triggers phone calls, fax exchanges, and delays that frustrate everyone.
When specialty medications are prescribed for serious, progressive conditions, those delays go beyond administrative inconvenience, becoming barriers to better patient outcomes.
Prescribers need visibility into PA requirements before the prescription is sent, so that when authorization is needed, the submission begins with the right information already attached. A diagnosis code, a step therapy history, a clinical note—small pieces of information that can mean the difference between immediate approval and weeks of back-and-forth.
In fact, an in-workflow nudge for providers to include an ICD-10 code at the point of prescribing has shown significant results, with prescription inclusion of diagnosis codes jumping from 11% to nearly 70% within weeks of implementation.* The right information at the right moment removes friction instead of adding it.
Our Chief Medical Officer answers that question this way: “The prescribing moment is our clinical ‘moment of truth,’ yet it’s often where the workflow hits a wall. A generic alert isn’t just a nuisance; it’s dangerous because it trains us to tune everything out. When you flood the zone with noise, you drown out the critical signals, and that’s when patient safety is at risk.”
The difference between disruption and decision support is clinical context like the patient’s specific coverage, pharmacy requirements, or affordability. A clinician with access to real-time prescribing insights can see whether:
The medication needs to be sent to an LDN rather than the patient’s preferred retail pharmacy
Rather than pushing prescribers out of the prescribing workflow, they receive contextual information, right when it’s needed. Click and continue—no separate lookups, no system switching.
Then, moments after a prescription is sent, patients receive a personalized SMS message from their physician with information they need at their fingertips, such as:
These touchpoints close the gap between clinical intent and patient action, which is where adherence most often breaks down.
The cumulative effect is a prescription that leaves the prescriber’s system with everything it needs to be filled and a patient who has everything they need to fill it.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers invest enormous resources in getting a drug to market. Much of that investment is designed to ensure that patients get connected to the best therapy for their diagnosis. But today’s prescribing workflow—the moment all that effort pays off or doesn’t—isn’t designed to support providers.
As Dr. Banas notes, “We’ve reached a tipping point where the status quo is officially broken: You currently have more visibility into your pizza order on your phone than you do the status of a life-saving medication. With actionable, real-time data, physicians can get back to treating people, not shuffling administrative paperwork.”
Actionable support changes what’s possible at that moment, removing the “noise” to benefit providers and ensuring patients can start and stay on innovative therapies sooner.
Learn how TimelySM by DrFirst® delivers real-time prescribing intelligence in the EHR workflow and engages patients at critical moments. Let’s talk.
*Timely by DrFirst internal data