Dear Colleagues,

I hope you are staying cool this summer! Our team has been busy—in fact, you may have noticed some updates to the PAN website that make finding and securing PAN assistance easier than ever!

 

We restructured the Medications Covered pages to make them easier to sort and view, allowing you to quickly scan through covered medications and find what you’re looking for—read more about this below. We also revised the structure of our website homepage to help new users navigate the site and find what they need fast.

 

As you recall, our Grant Use Policy helps us ensure that patients use their grants as intended to help cover the out-of-pocket costs for critical medications. To ensure your patients’ grants remain active, you and your patients must request and receive payment for a claim from PAN within 120 days of a patient’s enrollment date. Throughout a patient’s eligibility period, PAN must receive another claim within 120 days of the previous claim. If a claim is not received in this timeframe, your patient’s grant will be canceled, and the released funds will be used to provide grants to other patients who need assistance. This policy launched on May 7, 2018, so if your patients enrolled on that day and have not yet submitted claims, they must do so by September 4, 2018, to stay enrolled.

 

We continuously strive to put patients first and keep our funds open to help as many people as possible, and we’re always looking for ways to spread the word on the assistance we provide. U.S News and World Report recently helped with that—the PAN Foundation was featured in a slide show on strategies for saving money on prescription medications. Check it out here.

As always, feel free to reach out to me directly at aazam@panfoundation.org or 202-347-4451. I look forward to continuing to work together!

 

Kind regards,

Ayesha Azam

Senior Director of Medical Affairs

Find out when PAN Funding is Available

You may know about our fund reopen notification system, which alerts you when an assistance program has reopened. This feature helps providers and pharmacists stay on top of a fund’s status, and it also helps us understand how many patients need assistance for each program.

What Drugs are Covered in PAN’s Funds?

The PAN Foundation covers all prescription medications, including generic or bioequivalent drugs, that are either FDA-approved or listed in official compendia or published evidence-based or clinical guidelines for a diagnosis that qualifies a patient for the assistance program.

 

Each assistance program page features a list of all covered drugs within that disease fund. Alternatively, you can visit our revamped Medications Covered page and sort through medications alphabetically. Remember, the medication must be tied to the assistance program in order to receive reimbursement.

 

If you don’t see your drug, select the Send Us a Message button on the Medications Covered page.

 

To ensure you are submitting the appropriate items for reimbursement, please refer to our billing guides specifically for pharmacists .

PAN Establishes Amyloidosis Assistance Program

We are pleased to announce a new assistance program for people living with amyloidosis. Please be advised that availability is on a first-come, first-served basis.

 

Amyloidosis Assistance Program

Response to HHS Blueprint to Lower Drug Prices and Reduce Out-of-Pocket Costs

Together with 52 other patient advocacy groups, PAN submitted a letter in response to the HHS Blueprint to Lower Drug Prices and Reduce Out-of-Pocket Costs in mid-July. As organizations representing patients with serious, life-threatening, chronic, complex and disabling conditions, together we addressed important patient issues including the burden of out-of-pocket costs, importance of the safety net, the need for meaningful, easy to understand information to support patients and more. Read our letter here .

Pharmacy Toolbox: Tracking Your Patient’s

Grant

It is essential that you submit your claims to PAN in a timely manner.

Our Grant Use Policy requires you to submit and receive payment for your claims every 120 days. Claims submitted after the 120-day period will be denied and the grant will be canceled.

 

There are two ways to determine your patient’s deadline to file claims to PAN. You can monitor your patient’s claim activity on the PAN Pharmacy Portal , or you can contact the PAN call center at 1-866-316-7263.

Pharmacy Spotlight: Amanda Berishaj,

Vice President of Clinical Services, Direct Rx

 

Where do you work and what is your position?

I am the vice president of clinical services, so I oversee all of our clinical outreach programs and pharmacists and clinical staff. I have been here for 14 years.

 

What is rewarding about your job?

It sounds completely cliché, but I love being able to help patients, see them get better and keep them out of the hospital. Whether it is keeping patients more adherent to the therapy, or a tip we provided that helped them stay on their medication—just the overwhelming feeling of helping somebody, and they feel that we’ve helped them in return .

 

Tell us about the patients you see at Direct Rx.

We see patients that fall into the nephrology bucket, so they have some type of renal or heart disease that causes electrolyte imbalances. We also see a lot of respiratory patients and we work with hospitals just trying to keep the patients out of the hospitals. We really don’t want our patients to get readmitted; there is a lot of pressure on hospitals right now. We also see psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis C and HIV.

 

How has the PAN Foundation affected your patients?

Having PAN as a resource for our patients has honestly allowed them to stay on therapy longer and has assisted in keeping them out of the hospital. I know how much gratitude these patients have and how relieved they are to have that supplement to help them pay for their medications. Many of the patients sometimes have to choose, “do I buy food, or do I pay for my medications?” They are that expensive. Having that additional resource just really helps.

Pharmacy Payment Cycle Updates

 

In case you haven’t heard, PAN’s pharmacy partner, DST Pharmacy Solutions, has moved to a bi-monthly payment cycle. Payments to pharmacies will now be issued on the 15th and 30th of each month.

New Grant Balance Feature

 

You may have noticed that now, when you submit a claim electronically to PAN, you can view your patient’s remaining grant balance. See image:

 

Upcoming Conferences

 

Will you be attending any conferences this fall? Our team will attend or exhibit at the following events. We hope to see you there!