If You Want to Manage Cardiorenal Metabolic Disease, You Need More of This | PBMI 2025

There is no end to the epidemiologic evidence that cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases overlap, and they share a web of risk factors and biological mechanisms. Care for patients with cardiorenal metabolic (CRM) disease is often provided by multiple providers over many years.

“In order to really control costs in CRM, you need to understand all of your data,” said Jennie Barlow, Pharm.D., MBA, during an interview at the 2025 Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute (PBMI) Annual National Conference last week. “You can drive to the lowest net cost for [drugs], but you may not also understand all the medical costs as well. So we really need to have interoperability so that the lab data and the medical data and the pharmacy data are available to the plan so that they can make decisions for how to drive to the lowest cost of care in this category.

Barlow, an associate vice president, pharmacy industry relations, at Scripius, was one of the panelists at a session at the PBMI meeting about aligning pharmacy benefits with outcomes for cardiorenal disease. Barlow and the other panelists agreed that patient data is currently scattered, making it difficult to take a comprehensive approach to patient care and related costs.

“Ultimately, each system doesn't talk well with each other,” Barlow said. Making data “system agnostic” would help PBMs pull lab and other data so they could evaluate overall treatment plans. “That's not something we're able to realize right now, and it's something that if we are able to realize…we really can drive to better outcomes,” she said.