Ambulatory care pharmacists drive higher specialty prescription capture. By Gina Shaw Ambulatory care pharmacists at Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) kept two-thirds of the specialty prescriptions they wrote inside the health system's own specialty pharmacy, more than double the rate for the system's prescribers overall, according to a presentation at the ASHP Pharmacy Futures 2026 meeting, in St. Louis. The analysis, covering fiscal year 2025, measured what the team calls clinical continuity: the share of specialty prescriptions retained at the system's integrated health-system specialty pharmacy. At YNHH, ambulatory care pharmacists are embedded in primary care and 13 specialty clinics and work under collaborative practice agreements that let them prescribe. Across all of those specialties, their clinical continuity was 67.0%, compared with 32% across all providers in the system. Ambulatory care pharmacists "do a much better job" compared with other providers, such as physician associates, advanced practice registered nurses, and physicians, at ensuring a prescription is sent to an internal pharmacy, said Richard Yik, PharmD, a PGY-2 ambulatory care pharmacy resident and the presenting author. "Specifically with specialty prescriptions, that can make a big impact." The three clinics with the lowest continuity were traditional primary care, digestive health, and neurology; the three highest were metabolic primary care, cardiology, and endocrine. Primary care's lower rate did not surprise the investigators. "Their capture rate is a little bit less compared to some of our other specialty clinics; those patients may be in underserved areas, and they may not require that specialty prescription moni-toring that we offer when we send them to an internal specialty pharmacy," Dr. Yik said. To understand where prescriptions went instead, the group reviewed prescriptions that left for an external specialty pharmacy. Before any specialty prescription is released outside, Dr. Yik said, the internal team checks whether it can be filled in-house based on the patient's insurance, then logs the reason if it cannot. Insurance requirements accounted for 76.3% of the prescriptions sent out, with patient preference and free drug programs among the other leading reasons. The goal was to separate prescriptions the system could realistically recapture from those it could not. "We excluded all of the non-capturable orders," Dr. Yik said, describing how the team set aside insurance requirements, free drug programs, out-of-state patients, and limited distribution drugs the pharmacy does not stock. "Then we looked at categories like direct-to-outside pharmacy and patient preference to see which ones are actually actionable and can increase our capture rate." By that measure, neurology and digestive health showed the most room to grow. But neurology's apparent upside came with a caveat: The specialty pharmacy's report captured only multiple sclerosis drugs, and agents such as dimethyl fumarate (Tecfidera, Biogen) are available far more cheaply as generics through Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs than through insurance. "That's why their potential increased capture rate is so high, because theoretically, if we were able to fill them, we could," Dr. Yik said, noting that that capture is unlikely in practice, since patients cannot be asked to pay more out of pocket to keep a prescription in the system. Digestive health was harder to explain. The clinic had little pharmacist participation in the data, Dr. Yik said, and will need manual chart review to determine why its prescriptions are leaving. The team did not evaluate the transplant or pulmonology clinics, which use a different clinical context that made their prescription data harder to identify. Overall, the authors concluded, ambulatory pharmacy services integrated into specialty practices can strengthen clinical continuity. "Our ambulatory pharmacists at Yale do a great job at keeping prescriptions internal," Dr. Yik said.

Exclusive: Rad AI expands partnership with flagship health system Yale New Haven. Yale New Haven Health will deploy Rad AI's radiology tools across its multi-network health system while co-developing and clinically testing new radiology technologies. California-based Rad AI, a generative AI radiology workflow company, is extending its partnership with Connecticut-based Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) to deploy its reporting technology across the health system's imaging network. "Yale was our first big academic site," Dr. Elizabeth Bergey, radiologist and chief clinical officer at Rad AI, told MobiHealthNews. "It's been a partnership where we've grown to trust each other and work with each other very closely to help develop a big part of what Rad AI provides now," Bergey said. Rad AI offers radiologists generative AI tools to help streamline workflows, such as physician dictation and follow-up care management. Its genAI-enabled reporting software helps radiologists create reports quickly by automating portions of the reporting process and reducing dictation time. The company's Omni Impressions generates AI-enabled report impressions after a radiologist dictates the raw findings, a tool that makes Rad AI stand out to radiologists, YNHHS' Dr. Melissa Davis, vice chair for imaging informatics, radiology and biomedical imaging and associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, told MobiHealthNews. "Rad AI is at the forefront, especially with its Omni Impressions tool," Davis said. "This is the one tool that if you ask a radiologist broadly, 'What's made my day better?' An impression generator is what it is, and Rad AI was at the forefront of that market." Yale New Haven will implement several of Rad AI's technologies, including Omni Impressions, across its multi-site network, which includes more than 16 outpatient imaging centers and five hospital campuses. Still, Davis said, the health system's goal is not to implement products but rather to co-develop new technologies with Rad AI that meet its specific needs. In addition to implementing Rad AI's existing tech into YNHHS, the company's now flagship healthcare system, the organizations will co-develop new specialized radiology-focused technologies that will be used and clinically tested at YNHHS. "There's a lot of questions that I think that they can help us solve on the ground, and so I'm not really thinking about it from a product standpoint at this point," Davis said. "Yes, we needed the reporter, like, that was the product for us, but my hope is that we can generate an actual partnership that starts to align with our needs and with their roadmap going forward." Davis said one of the health system's pain points, though Rad AI has not been solidified as the point of collaboration for this specifically, is data management. "We have a lot of information, and we don't know how to surface the questions that we actually need answered," Davis said. "How many radiologists should we have today? Are there certain services where we should staff up on certain times of the day? How can we do more predictive analysis, so that our radiologists can be more flexible in their scheduling is a huge pain point for us. How do we track productivity appropriately?" The partners say future technologies that will be developed and tested have yet to be nailed down, but many ideas are being explored regarding how to co-develop those technologies, and Rad AI said it has a system to meet such challenges. "We are hiring the best scientists there are. We are known for making a personalized model for impressions, and that kind of base skill set is what we have, which is building custom models for radiology-specific tasks," Bergey said. "We have some great ideas, and I'm very excited on how we can expand together because it is a great partnership." HIMSS is hosting the one-day AI Executive Leadership Summit in Boston June 24, 2026, followed by its AI in Healthcare Forum June 25-26. Register separately for the two events here and here.

Yale New Haven Health has awarded $50,000 each to four projects through its 2026 Innovation Awards, focusing on early detection and improved healthcare access. The competition, held through YNHH's Center for Health Care Innovation, announced winners on 27 May during the Yale Innovation Summit. Gold award winners included Neuroprobe, an implantable monitoring system for severe brain injuries that tracks pressure, electrical activity, temperature and oxygen levels, and Enrich Health, a digital platform connecting Medicaid recipients with prenatal care. Silver awards went to ECG OMI, an AI tool analysing electrocardiograms to detect overlooked heart attacks, and Lumen, which uses mixed-reality technology to display medical imaging during procedures. Additional bronze awards recognised innovations in kidney disease management, surgical instrument inspection and rare disease diagnosis.