Specialty therapies continue to transform treatment across oncology, diabetes, rare disease, and other complex disease states. From 2020 to 2025, specialty medications accounted for 75% of new drug approvals. However, developing new therapies doesn’t immediately translate into patients receiving them quickly, consistently, or successfully.
Health systems today face a critical challenge: Fragmentation across the growing network of people, processes, and technologies required to support patients throughout therapy.
Specialty medications come with complex clinical, financial, and administrative requirements. Patients and care teams must navigate benefits investigations, prior authorization, financial assistance, and fulfillment logistics before treatment begins. After treatment starts, adherence challenges and clinical or access barriers introduce another layer of complexity. At the same time, the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis (NCHWA) projects a shortage of 30,400 pharmacists by 2038.
As specialty therapies become a larger part of care, and pharmacies experience workforce shortages, the need for an integrated approach becomes increasingly important. Shields Health Solutions’ integrated care model brings clinical expertise, technology, and data together, providing a more coordinated system from prescription intake through ongoing therapy. Rather than addressing each task on its own, the model allows health systems to connect the people, workflows, and insights that improve patient outcomes.
Performance depends on connecting the entire specialty care continuum
An integrated specialty care model requires more than efficiently managing individual steps in the prescription process. When people, workflows, and patient information are disconnected, manual work can consume valuable resources, contribute to treatment delays, and make consistent patient support more difficult.
Specialty patients are particularly vulnerable to these challenges. Many are managing multiple chronic conditions, seeing several specialists, and receiving care across sites. Each handoff creates another opportunity for important information to become disconnected.
Technology can address individual challenges across specialty pharmacy, but solving each problem separately does not necessarily create a connected patient experience. As point solutions accumulate, health systems can still be left navigating disconnected workflows, systems, and patient information.
A truly integrated model takes a different approach. By connecting people, workflows, and patient information across intake, authorization, patient engagement, and clinical management, health systems can create greater continuity across the full patient journey.
An integrated model provides the infrastructure needed to coordinate care at scale
As health systems look to improve specialty care performance, many are investing in digital tools and automation. But automation alone doesn’t solve fragmentation. In fact, 60% of hospitals and health systems have more than 50 software solutions for operations. When these tools operate independently, care teams must navigate multiple systems, manually reconciling disconnected data to determine what needs action. More administrative work means less time with patients.
The opportunity with an integrated care model is informed automation, connecting patient information and automating appropriate tasks while applying clinical intelligence to surface meaningful insights. Instead of spending time finding and interpreting information across systems, pharmacists and technicians can focus their expertise on taking action, from identifying patient needs to addressing barriers to therapy to delivering personalized support.
The payoff is faster access, stronger adherence, and better outcomes
The impact of Shields’ model begins before the first dose. Coordinating intake, benefits investigation, and prior authorization to remove administrative friction has resulted in a 200% increase in prior authorization throughput, a time to therapy of under 48 hours compared with the seven-to-10-day industry average, and $2 billion in financial assistance for patients in 2025 alone.
Once treatment begins, specialty care teams get the visibility and clinical context needed to identify and address adherence barriers, intervene when patients need additional support, and help keep therapy on track. Extending coordination to the full patient journey lets health systems turn faster access into more continuous patient support, creating stronger conditions for adherence and better outcomes.
The next phase of evolution for specialty care
As specialty therapies continue to grow in complexity, the organizations best positioned to succeed will be those that can connect data, workflows, and clinical expertise across the full continuum of care. The future of specialty pharmacy will depend not on adding more technology, but on creating a more connected system for patients and care teams. Shields’ integrated care model drives connected performance, serving as the infrastructure that lets health systems turn insight into action and coordinate patient care journeys at scale.
