Specialty Pharmacy Summit 2025: What do patients want from pharmacy?

Specialty pharmacy continues to grow as an emerging area of pharmacy practice—arguably an area that pharmacies cannot ignore if they wish to build a sustainable practice. The team at the Neighbourhood Pharmacy Association of Canada has made specialty pharmacy the focus of an annual two-day conference in recent years and this year the spotlight was on the patient’s experience.A number of the sessions at the 2025 Specialty Pharmacy Summit included patients or patient advocates who had messages for pharmacists and pharmacies who are, or wish to be involved in care of patient on specialty medications. One of those was to pause and consider what the patient in front of you is actually going through and what they truly need from you.Keynote speaker Sara Levitt, is a patient advocate, social media personality and model who has lived with Chron’s Disease since the age of 3. She shares the realities of life with Chron’s —and her decision to not let the disease limit her—with her 50,000 followers and has appeared on national television and in publications worldwide. To the pharmacy stakeholders at the Specialty Summit, Levitt shared that she and patients like her tend to rely on social media and networks of fellow patients, so pharmacists have an important information and care gap to fill to provide accurate and personalized information and advice and be there for ongoing support. “There’s a diff between handing patients a prescription and helping them live with one,” said Levitt. A pharmacist’s care should start with the prescription, not end with it.”A patient panel that followed only served to reinforce the message that perhaps even more so than with more common prescription regimes, specialty pharmacy providers such have a responsibility to care for the patient behind the prescription. Bonnie Hall, a former pharmaceutical industry consultant and patient with multiple myeloma and Beth Vanstone, a rare disease advocate who has shepherded her daughter though a lifetime with cystic fibrosis both stressed the mental and emotional toll of being diagnosed with a rare condition that requires complex, costly medications (access to which require reams of forms and hoop-jumping) often in multiples, typically with complicated regimes and usually accompanied by brutal adverse reactions. "What I really want," said Hall. "Is for someone to put their arms around me and say, "I've got your back, and be with me through the journey." Patients on specialty meds are often also on multiple other medications, she added, so a pharmacist who will take the time to untangle the whole knot of meds and regimes and help to make it easier and safer to adhere would be a godsend. "I feel I suffered needlessly because no one took on that role for me.""Remember," said Vanstone," These patients are going through a lot. They are scared and confused and intimidated by the system." How to make the time?Offering this type of support to patients on specialty medications requires having the time to step back, sit down and do some research, listen to the patient, learn from them and formulate solutions for them. How does a busy pharmacy make time for this to happen?Nicholas Hui suggests making effective use of technology; AI specifically. Hui, co-founder of MedMe Health demonstrated a number of ways in which AI-powered workflow systems can take on some of the information gathering and providing roles of pharmacy staff to free them to work with patients. Most of these technologies—for just pennies per hour—can competently handle basic information tasks and even some customer service.Collaborations between specialty pharmacies and community pharmacies is another way to better serve the whole patient and make effective use of limited pharmacy resources. Jason Wentzell, president and CEO of Extend Pharmacy Group, which provides outpatient oncology pharmacy services, shared how his pharmacies partner with other community pharmacies to enable full-circle care to cancer patients on complex regimes.With new specialty pharmaceuticals coming available all the time, Hanna concluded, pharmacy will have to get a handle on how to step up and provide better care to patients in a way that is also sustainable for pharmacy.

Specialty Pharmacy Summit 2025: What do patients want from pharmacy?

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