COO
PrescribeWellness
Johnston, Iowa
Patty Kumbera was a Co-Founder in and served as Chief Operating Officer for OutcomesMTM for its first 15 years. Outcomes was a market leader in the field of Medication Therapy Management Services (MTMS) and was acquired by Cardinal Healthcare in 2015.
A graduate of the Drake University College of Pharmacy, Patty has been active in the evolution of Medicare Part D medical therapy management (MTM) services since they were introduced in 2006. She incited progress in MTM by urging CMS and Medicare Part D plan sponsors to regard MTM beyond its basic necessity—to comprehend its profound potential for enhancing quality health care and reducing costs for all parties involved in its delivery. In 2011, she proceeded to implement MTM services at the nation’s largest patient-centered medical home (PCMH).
Along with filling an essential role in health care advancement, Patty and her coworkers pioneered a practical business model to expand pharmacist services and deliver compensation for successful outcomes. This business model, founded on the face-to-face difference they knew was crucial to successful medication therapy management, gave birth to the OutcomesMTM Program in 1999. After a thriving decade, Patty received the Drake University College of Pharmacy and Health Science’s Alumni Achievement Award in 2009.
Now a key member of instrumental health care leadership forums/committees, Patty has spent over two decades advocating the value of face-to-face MTM services all over the country, and received the inaugural APhA-APPM Distinguished Achievement Award in Pharmacy Management in 2013 - an honor she continues to uphold.
Patty took her enthusiasm for improving patient care to the next level as the Director Clinical Quality Programs at Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield with a broadened focus of all providers in the health care system. She helped create the dialogue to measuring provider performance and reporting it in a way consumers can understand quality based on attributes of what is important to them. Appreciating that quality goes beyond clinical structure, process and outcomes metrics, but also includes patient experience and engagement factors is key to providing patients with resources to help them choose the best providers and make difficult health care decisions.
Recently, through her work with AMCP, she facilitated a pharmacy profession- wide consensus of definitions related to MTM and SNOMED CT codes used to created MTM Value Sets hosted by AMCP, PQA and PHIT Collaborative – with interoperability being the driver of forward progress in patient care.
Patty’s patient-focused passion is helping advance appropriate safety and handling processes through continuous temperature monitoring to assure temperature sensitive medications will be safe and effective for patients throughout the entire cold chain. TempAlert transforms how organizations sense, monitor, and make decisions.
Today, Patty is consulting with innovative companies like PrescribeWellness, who share her passion of being motivated by the opportunity to challenge the status quo…energized by building consensus, helping people to understand the "why,” and creating solutions which allows everyone to win - never losing sight that it is all about the patient.
Tuesday, March 26
2:30 PM – 5:30 PM