Pharmacy benefits

Employees and their families use their pharmacy plan more than any other health insurance benefit, making it one of the biggest drivers of an employer’s medical spend.1 In fact, 90% of employers said that high drug prices threaten their ability to provide affordable employee benefits.2

A UnitedHealthcare benefits portfolio that includes both medical and pharmacy is designed to help lower costs, simplify experiences, streamline plan administration, and improve medication adherence and overall health for your employees.

Built for better outcomes for everyone

Helping lower costs

Digital cost estimation tools, strategic Prescription Drug List (PDL) design, specialty medication management strategies and more combine to help make prescription drugs more affordable.

Supporting more informed decisions

An integrated medical and pharmacy approach is built to help providers, pharmacists and employees make more informed choices so the right drugs are used in a patient's care plan in the right setting and with the right support.

Delivering a streamlined experience

Using both medical and pharmacy data, we can help streamline prior authorization for medications and deliver a simpler experience for your employees and your business.

Working together for healthier employees

UnitedHealthcare pharmacy and medical benefits are built to work together to deliver a more complete picture of employee health care and medication use. That kind of big-picture visibility is central to improving outcomes, like:

  • Alerting a doctor when a patient misses a critical prescription refill to avoid new complications
  • Identifying an employee as a potential genetic match for lower-cost cancer treatment
  • Avoiding prior authorization delays with real-time analysis of medical claims data

Employees with integrated UnitedHealthcare medical and pharmacy benefits had 18% better medication adherence for top chronic conditions than employees without integrated benefits3

Reducing costs for employees, improving medication adherence

About half of consumers said they had abandoned a prescription because it was too expensive.4 Bringing down prescription costs for employees is critical to medication adherence and better health.

Tools like PreCheck MyScript® are designed to make it easier for physicians to access each patient's specific PDL and cost information, as well as identify lower-cost alternatives and any prior authorization requirements — saving employees on prescription costs.5

Managing high-cost specialty medications

The use of specialty medications has grown by more than 10% over the past 4 years.6 This is partly because new therapies are being approved for rare diseases that previously had no treatment options, and existing therapies are being approved for new indications, making them more relevant to a greater number of patients.

Specialty medications are growing in price, too, currently averaging about $84,000 per medication per year.7

With proactive pipeline and PDL management, we work to identify lower-cost medications, at an average savings of 41%.8  Directing employees to virtual visits focused on their specialty medication and to nonhospital locations for medication infusions, we help employees better understand their medications — and deliver 30% to 50% savings per infusion when shifted to a nonhospital setting.9

UnitedHealthcare Site of Care

Helping employees make informed choices

Integrated data helps deliver a full view of medical, pharmacy, clinical, lab and other information so we can better identify opportunities for targeted, personalized outreach to at-risk employees and coordinated support from advocates, nurses and pharmacists who see the same information at the same time.

The UnitedHealthcare® app and myuhc.com® give employees access to both their medical and pharmacy plan information all in one place to help make it easier for them to understand their benefits and make more informed choices, which may lead to healthier outcomes.

8%–11% more gaps in care closed for employees with integrated UnitedHealthcare medical and pharmacy benefits3

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