For many healthcare practices, getting a prescribed medication into a patient’s hands is a labor-intensive process for both the care team and the patient.
The work burden can be especially heavy for smaller practices without dedicated medication access staff or access to enterprise solutions. Prior authorization (PA) may fall to already stretched clinical or administrative staff. Financial assistance may not get handled internally at all, leaving patients to search for copay or foundation support on their own, or worse, give up on therapy.
At Cinnamon, our mission is to change that status quo. That’s why we built an all-in-one platform that brings medication access and affordability into one connected workflow. Now, we’re making that solution available to healthcare practices of all sizes at no cost.
Bringing access and affordability into a single workflow
Getting started on a prescribed therapy should be fast and easy for patients. In reality, what should be a single journey gets broken up into a number of distinct workflows, with access and affordability work happening independently of each other.
Staff often still have to log on to multiple portals and manually input the same patient details in each one, despite the fact that each process depends on the other. For example, the result of a PA can affect what financial support the patient is eligible for, which then determines what application work needs to happen next.
To solve for this, we made Cinnammon an all-in-one system that creates a natural flow from prior authorization into financial assistance, including eligibility and application support. We also digitized and automated much of the time-consuming manual work known to create bottlenecks in the process.
And we made the platform available at no cost to healthcare practices, so financial concerns wouldn’t prevent teams from benefiting from the solution.
Making the solution available to all healthcare practices
Until recently, not all practices were an ideal fit for Cinnamon because our platform initially worked only with electronic health record (EHR) integrations. This required support from Cinnamon’s own implementation team as well as IT resources and administrative buy-in from the practice.
That model made it tougher for smaller practices without IT resources to benefit from Cinnamon, despite the fact that they faced the same medication access and affordability workflow issues as larger systems.
This fall, we added a self-registration process with these smaller teams and pharmacies in mind. Now, practices of any size can use Cinnamon without the requirement of a technical integration process.
How self-registration automates workflows for provider teams
Here’s how it works: To get started with Cinnamon, practices simply need to create an account using a work email, tax ID, national provider identifier (NPI), and other practice details.
Once the account is verified and activated, teams follow a guided workflow to upload or enter patient information and clinical documentation to start both access and affordability workstreams.
For access, Cinnamon’s pharmacist-trained AI drafts answers to PA questions, using the patient information shared by the care team. The team can simply review the draft, make edits if necessary, and submit the PA.
For affordability, Cinnamon’s Coverage Waterfall algorithm automatically matches the patient with relevant financial assistance programs, then helps the team begin enrollment by auto-filling applications and coordinating signatures.
All of this work happens within the platform. Provider teams no longer have to manually search to see if an affordability program is available for specific therapies. They no longer have to mail paper forms to patients to sign and send back. Signatures get collected digitally, with an average completion time of just under eight hours.
What Cinnamon’s platform offers provider teams is distinct from solutions that effectively outsource the work as a service. We don’t do that. Rather than giving the work to a different team of people, we give practice staff the technology to handle the work themselves and do it at scale.
Helping provider teams help patients
Making Cinnamon easier to access is ultimately about making medication access easier to manage. If a smaller practice can move a prior authorization forward faster, find the right financial support without manual Google searches, complete the paperwork digitally, and keep track of the patient without cobbling together multiple tools, the patient has a better chance of actually getting onto therapy. The care team can spend a lot less time and energy on administrative work, too.
That’s our goal behind self-registration. We want to put Cinnamon in front of more practices, but more importantly, we want to give more care teams the tools to help patients get the medications they’ve already been prescribed.
We know that many people in provider teams chose to work in healthcare with the mission-driven purpose to help and care for people. We also know these team members often end up getting overstretched to optimize medication access and affordability support for each individual patient. The gap between the level of support they would provide under ideal circumstances and the level that can realistically be provided within existing systems can leave even highly-motivated teams feeling disheartened and exhausted.
At Cinnamon, we sit a step behind the scenes. We don’t help patients directly, but we help people help patients. Our goal with self-registration is to allow more teams to serve more patients without making sacrifices to their work-life balance. No one should have to manually fill out forms through lunch breaks or search for co-pay programs after hours.
Better medication access should allow more people to start and stay on the therapies they need. It should also give provider teams the breathing room to focus on their true calling of providing quality care to patients. With Cinnamon self-registration, we hope to achieve both.
Register today or reach out to us to explore how Cinnamon can benefit your practice.
