A year ago, Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Novant Health made a bold bet on the future of pharmacy. The health system launched MedVenta Health Solutions, a company meant to reimagine how pharmacy could support value-based care beyond hospital walls.
That bet is starting to pay off.
“Over the past year, we’ve had a number of really exciting conversations and some interesting new partnerships develop as we’ve not just launched, but then brought some of those services to market to help address costs and care gaps,” Joe Maki, PharmD, senior vice president of pharmacy for Novant Health and president of MedVenta, told Becker’s.
MedVenta was born from Novant’s own success.
“We had built a really special and exciting outpatient pharmacy enterprise for Novant Health and wanted to bring a lot of what we learned out into the market,” Dr. Maki said.
What began as an internal experiment has since become an engine for growth, aligning Novant’s pharmacy arm with its larger push toward access, affordability and preventive care.
That alignment is visible in the system’s expanding retail and infusion network and especially in Mediful, a chronic disease management service that has become central to Novant’s approach. Through Mediful, certified clinical pharmacists work directly with patients, virtually and in coordination with physicians, to manage conditions such as diabetes, heart failure and anticoagulation.
“Through Mediful, what we’ve been able to do is set up a virtual care program that has no cost for patients,” Dr. Maki said. “We see those patients virtually, do an initial assessment and then set up follow-up appointments after that to help them initiate and be successful on therapies to help with their chronic disease state.”
The program’s scale has grown rapidly. What began as a small team of pharmacists working primarily in person has expanded into a virtual network of more than 50 pharmacists collaborating with more than 180 Novant Health clinics and managing care for roughly 30,000 patients. That growth has come with measurable results: Among patients with diabetes enrolled in the program, average A1C levels have fallen by 2.1 percentage points — nearly twice the improvement typically seen from medication alone.
Early data from Novant’s Charlotte, N.C., market shows that patients in Mediful are also being readmitted to the hospital less often. In a pilot program tracking total cost of care, MedVenta found that while pharmacy spending per member rose slightly — as more patients filled prescriptions — overall medical spending declined.
“If you align pharmacists to manage chronic diseases, they will show an overall improvement in how those chronic diseases are affecting the population and driving utilization of expensive healthcare resources,” Dr. Maki said.
For Novant Health, those results support a broader shift: pharmacy as a driver of value-based care.
“The major way that we’re helping Novant be successful and other providers be successful in the value-based care programs is through diversification of our delivery portfolio,” Dr. Maki said. That strategy includes ambulatory infusion centers, which allow patients to receive high-cost specialty medications in lower-cost outpatient settings.
In one of MedVenta’s recent collaborations, the company helped patients begin therapy faster, coordinating prior authorizations in less than two days and scheduling infusions within two weeks.
“It’s been a really win-win-win for all parties, because of course for our patients, that also means lower out-of-pocket costs,” he said.
As Novant looks ahead to 2026, Dr. Maki said the goal is to continue expanding access points and strengthening partnerships that link pharmacy to population health.
“Pharmacy is, on the prescription-benefit side, a quarter of overall benefit costs at this point,” he said. “When you start to layer in the medical benefit and pharmacy costs, it’s maybe a third. That’s a huge pain point for risk-bearing organizations.
“The big area we’re focused on is making sure all those access points exist — developing those stronger, deeper partnerships that look at how populations are performing on value-based care contracts, how patients are doing with their chronic diseases and aligning MedVenta’s services to drive better outcomes, better cost of care and overall better quality of life.”
