PBMI Innovator Patrick Gleason, Pharm.D.

Patrick Gleason, Pharm.D., assistant vice president of health outcomes at Prime Therapeutics, has become one of the most respected people in the pharmacy benefit management industry. Next year, as the president of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, he wants to combat misinformation about vaccines.

He has been named a recipient of the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute's (PBMI) Innovators Award for this year, an honor that recognizes professionals leading innovation in pharmacy benefits.

Gleason traces his path to pharmacy back to a college friendship: he started out studying chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota before a conversation with a friend's father, a pharmacist, pointed him toward pharmacy school instead. He went on to complete a residency and fellowship in health outcomes research at the University of Pittsburgh, then returned to Minnesota as a junior faculty member, where he helped set up what became a medication therapy management teaching clinic. After a stint as a medical liaison for a pharmaceutical manufacturer, he joined Prime Therapeutics in 2002, when the company had about 200 employees.

What keeps him engaged, he said, is the range of the work itself. "You have to like who you work with and what you do," Gleason said, pointing to formulary and benefit design, prior authorization and step therapy programs, and translating pharmacy and medical claims data into decisions about how medications are actually used.

Among the initiatives he highlighted is a proprietary program that surveils drug regimens to flag opportunities to move members to lower-cost, similarly effective therapies after they've already started treatment; Gleason said it has generated more than $200 million in drug therapy savings since launch. He also negotiates value-based contracts with manufacturers that return money to payers when a therapy doesn't deliver on its promised outcomes, and he oversees real-world evidence work, including a multiyear study tracking outcomes and cost trends among members who started GLP-1 therapy for obesity.

In this video, Gleason discusses that career path in more detail, along with where he sees artificial intelligence fitting into pharmacy benefit management — always, he stressed, with a human in the loop — and his prediction that the PBMs best positioned for the future will be those that pair strong clinical care programs with in-house real-world evidence capabilities.

Read Gleason’s full profile here.

AI assisted in the writing of this summary.