Speaker 0: This is where health care leadership comes together. Becker's sixteenth annual meeting brings more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives and nearly 800 speakers to Chicago, April 13 through the sixteenth. This year's event includes keynote conversations with Dallas Cowboys legend Troy Aikman and former president George w Bush. For the agenda and event details, visit beckershospitalreview.com and click on the events tab in the upper right. We're looking forward to hosting you in Chicago.

Speaker 1: This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare podcast, and we are recording live at the thirteenth annual CEO and CFO roundtable. I'm currently joined by Jigger Tucker, who is the former chief administrative officer at OU Health. Thanks so much for joining today. I'm gonna have you just take a moment and introduce yourself, tell us a little bit more about your background.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you, and thanks for having me. But, as you said, Jigger Tucker, I'm now the CEO of LongitudeRx. Very excited about being here and sharing what we do.

Speaker 1: Alright. So let's have our conversation start off with a little bit about your growth strategy over the next few years.

Speaker 2: So LongitudeRx was really founded by five major health systems, Providence Health, Baylor Scott and White, Memorial Hermann, Michigan Medicine, and Novant. So really a company that was founded by health systems for health systems. And we're really focused on bringing back, the specialty pharmacy opportunity back into health systems, which traditionally has been really dominated by payers, PBMs. And there's really a market need to integrate this care further and bring back the care within the health system side.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. And tell us about the most exciting or impactful initiative or project you're currently working on.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I'd love to share. So if you look at, you know, I'll back up with the FDA pipeline. About 85% of the meds, in the FDA pipeline for this year, believe it or not, are considered specialty meds. And what's happening with health systems today is a lot of those patients are really getting a fragmented experience in their care because they're having to go to either many different pharmacies, or having to deal with financial assistance issues, financial toxicities with these expensive medications.

And so one of the most meaningful things, that we've been able to do over this past year for our health systems is really start in, and honing in on that experience with the technology platform that we utilize, and really bring that care not only back inside the health system from a revenue perspective, but really from a patient experience perspective. We're highly focused on, you know, making sure that we're improving that experience, and and really keeping that at the center to make sure that the care is not fragmented for them.

Speaker 1: And what is the most important thing you think that health care executives should be doing right now to make sure their organizations are successful in the future? Yeah.

Speaker 2: One of the things I I tell health system executives is specialty pharmacy, whether you are following it or not, your patients are on those medications. Right? So any given health systems, about 20% of their net patient service revenue, believe it or not, now could be tied to specialty medications. So if you don't have really a care delivery platform that is helping you and your health system pharmacy team manage these patients, you're essentially not caring for a pretty significant portion of your population. And I think, traditionally, you know, health systems have started paying attention to this, but what they don't realize oftentimes is really the the complexity behind being able to actually take care of the total population.

And then looking at even from the payer and PBM side, you know, what it really takes to actually get network access as well as what it really takes to manage it from a analytics, and a technology perspective. Right? So I think a lot of, you know, tools are out there in the market that are point solutions, but no one really is looking at it from an end to end perspective, like we are trying to do at LongitudeRx.

Speaker 1: Absolutely. Well, Chigurh, thanks so much for joining me today on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Again, we are recording live at the thirteenth annual CEO and CFO roundtable.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate your time.