AUSTIN, Texas - On Tuesday, June 15, Ascension Rx hosted a special ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new Austin, Texas-based Pharmacy Services Center. Ascension Rx is the pharmacy arm of Ascension, the nation’s largest Catholic health system. Leaders from Ascension, Ascension Rx and the City of Austin were on hand to celebrate the new facility and the better connected care it offers patients across the country.
The Ascension Rx Pharmacy Services Center is a new, multifaceted, 30,000-square-foot facility that serves as a specialty pharmacy, distribution center and patient engagement hub for Ascension Rx sites across the U.S. This new home base expands and centralizes Ascension Rx specialty pharmacy operations, enables high-volume home delivery and creates efficiencies in processing and patient support.
“The compassion of our associates and clinicians is the heart of Ascension Rx,” said Lynn Eschenbacher, PharmD, MBA, Chief Pharmacy Officer, Ascension and Ascension Rx. “The work of our Ascension Rx care teams across our national healthcare system combined with the special capabilities within this facility will help to improve coordination so we can better serve patients and communities with comprehensive pharmacy care.”
Ascension Rx: A new model of pharmacy care
Ascension Rx provides patients with a comprehensive pharmacy solution and a compassionate, personalized approach. In October 2020, Ascension launched Ascension Rx to connect physicians, nurses and pharmacists, creating a unified patient and caregiver experience that improves coordination, safety and quality of care.
Ascension Rx functions as a high-touch clinical model centered on the patient-clinician relationship, offering specialty medication services, delivery, infusion therapy, and medication management.
In response to the complexity and fragmentation that healthcare consumers often experience when trying to get their prescriptions filled, Ascension Rx offers a seamless and coordinated experience that helps patients receive convenient access to the medicines they need, when and where they need them – whether at a nearby healthcare delivery site or at home.
Facts about the new Ascension Rx Pharmacy Services Center:
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Function: The Ascension Rx Pharmacy Services Center is a hub that connects Ascension pharmacy sites across the U.S.
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Size of facility: 30,000 square feet
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Cost of facility: $8 million
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Scale of operation: The Pharmacy Services Center houses three pharmacies and one patient engagement center that will support patients across all of Ascension, the nation’s largest nonprofit Catholic health system, with 146 hospitals and 2,600 sites of care across 19 states and the District of Columbia. Ascension Rx will have 40 pharmacists and 20 pharmacy technicians embedded in Ascension Medical Group clinics across the U.S. Ascension Rx also has 66 retail pharmacies with several hundred staff members.
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Production: Ascension Rx fills more than 1.7 million annual prescriptions.
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Jobs: The Austin-based facility currently employs 15 associates and can employ up to 50 associates.
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A community workspace for collaboration: Within this facility, Ascension Rx will share community space and work in close collaboration with Ascension Connect, the central navigation hub for all patients across Ascension. Ascension Connect assists patients with access, scheduling and referrals, among other things, providing millions of solutions for patients each year.
For more information about Ascension Rx, visit: ascension.org/AscensionRx
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About Ascension
Ascension is a faith-based healthcare organization dedicated to transformation through innovation across the continuum of care. As the largest non-profit and Catholic health system in the U.S., Ascension is committed to delivering compassionate, personalized care to all, with special attention to persons living in poverty and those most vulnerable. In FY2020, Ascension provided $2.4 billion in care of persons living in poverty and other community benefit programs. Ascension includes more than 160,000 associates and 40,000 aligned clinicians. The national health system operates more than 2,600 sites of care – including 146 hospitals and more than 40 senior living facilities – in 19 states and the District of Columbia, while providing a variety of services including clinical and network services, venture capital investing, investment management, biomedical engineering, facilities management, risk management, and contracting through Ascension’s own group purchasing organization.
