DUBLIN, Ohio — Cardinal Health Inc. said its new medication synchronization program, MedSync Advantage, offers manifold benefits for community pharmacies in terms of patient care and efficiency.

The latest offering in Cardinal’s Reach for the Stars suite of community pharmacy solutions, MedSync Advantage enables pharmacists to coordinate a patient’s prescriptions to be picked up on the same day each month. Cardinal said Thursday that the program not only simplifies the process for patients and caregivers who must fill multiple prescriptions, but it also improves patient medication adherence by helping to ensure they fill all scripts each month.

What’s more, the number of prescriptions that a patient fills each month sharpens inventory management for the pharmacy and opens up more time for the pharmacy staff to focus on interacting with patients, Cardinal noted.

“We believe medication synchronization is a core competency for medication therapy management expansion in the pharmacy, and we want to prepare our pharmacies to move toward a value-based pharmacy model for payment in the future,” Steve Lawrence, senior vice president of retail independent sales at Cardinal, said in a statement. “MedSync Advantage allows us to do that by re-engineering the pharmacy to allow for a more patient-centric approach to care.”

The web-based MedSync Advantage solution was designed Fuse, Cardinal Health’s innovation lab, which the company said aims to “connect technology with health care.” Fuse developed the MedSync Advantage online platform with direct input from community pharmacists, creating a custom tool that supports easier identification of eligible patients.

Other pharmacy-friendly features of MedSync Advantage include integration with pharmacy management systems, daily and monthly reporting, automated synchronization to facilitate adding customers, and single sign-on access via the Cardinal’s Order Express customer ordering platform.

MedSync Advantage already has earned kudos from community pharmacists.

“We’ve had the opportunity to look at Cardinal Health’s medication synchronization product, and it’s by far the best product that I’ve looked at,” stated pharmacist Larry Schieber, owner of Schieber Family Pharmacy in Circleville, Ohio. “We can get a lot of patients enrolled in this medication synchronization program, which is really a win-win for everybody. It’s a win for the patient, and it’s a win for us because it evens out our workflow and helps us operate more efficiently.”

“The most visible thing you get from medication synchronization is your time back,” noted pharmacist Julie Patten of Doc’s Drugs, a Braidwood, Ill.-based pharmacy operator.