Ashley Holzworth-Nash, Pharm.D., on her small-town roots, career path and a new business model for the PBM industry

Ashley Holzworth-Nash, Pharm.D., head of product strategy and solutions at Evernorth, traces the origins of her career in healthcare back to a single afternoon she spent shadowing a pharmacist as a teenager in western Pennsylvania. Neither of her parents worked in medicine or science, but a high school guidance counselor sent her to observe a local independent pharmacy, where she watched a pharmacist teach an elderly patient with diabetes how to administer insulin.

“Seeing this woman go from terrified and maybe hopeless to feeling confident and really thankful for her pharmacist helping her, I thought this is why my guidance counselor sent me here, because it combined helping people with what I like to know and that deep kind of knowledge in the sciences space,” Holzworth-Nash said in an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive.

Holzworth-Nash is one of six people being recognized this year as an Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute (PBMI) Innovator.

That experience in high school led Holzworth-Nash to pharmacy school in Pittsburgh and, later, a decade in sales and account management. The shift into product leadership came after a client conference in Washington, D.C., where she realized she wanted to work on solutions across her organization’s full book of clients rather than a single account.

“I’ve been working with my clients for so long, but my organization is so much more, and we can impact so many patients across so many clients,” she said of the moment that prompted her to call her boss and ask for a new role.

Holzworth-Nash now leads the team behind More Than Rx, a product suite built around services pharmacists can provide beyond dispensing medication, including immunizations, testing and treating for conditions such as strep and flu, and prescribing in states that allow it. The goal, she said, is to let pharmacists work at the top of their license while directing lower-acuity care away from urgent care and emergency settings.

Her team also owns Evernorth’s member-facing digital tools, which let members look up pharmacy coverage and medication costs before they reach the counter, part of a broader push toward pricing transparency across the pharmacy benefit management industry.

That shift toward transparency has also changed what it feels like to work in the pharmacy benefit business, Holzworth-Nash said. Long before this year’s wave of PBM reform, including federal appropriations legislation and an FTC settlement, she was part of an internal work group tasked with building a model meant to last after the company’s president urged the team to develop an approach the industry could operate on for decades, rather than the 30-year-old model it was replacing. “Sometimes you feel like the black sheep, because you knew you were doing really well, and you could see the outcomes from your clients, you could see the dollars being saved, but that wasn’t the story,” she said. “You always felt like you worked in the dark side, regardless of how much good that you saw that you were doing, and that was really hard.”