Approximately $3 billion is spent on prescription drugs by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania every year.
As the director of the Pennsylvania Office of Health Care Reform and a member of the Board of Overseers for the School of Nursing, Rosemarie Greco plans to start using the state's buying power to lower this cost.
This is just one of the many goals of the new OHCR, which was given the daunting task of finding ways to reduce waste in the way Pennsylvania funds health care.
This has meant getting people from many different state departments to cooperate with restructuring the way they conduct their daily business.
"I have never participated in anything so complex and challenging as this last year's endeavor," Greco said.
Greco describes the state departments as "tribes of people doing good work." The problem is that these groups can often waste time competing with each other unnecessarily and duplicating each other's work.
"We had three or four departments all competing for the same [federal] grants," Greco said.
According to Greco, uncoordinated efforts like this end up costing Pennsylvanians since the federal government does not award the same grant to multiple departments in a single state.
Since Governor Rendell created the OHCR last year, the communication between the health-related departments in the state has improved.
"We applied as a commonwealth and got three out of five grants offered" by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Greco added.
With funding from these grants, the Commonwealth is participating in a pilot program dedicated to shifting some people in need of long-term care from nursing homes to in-home care.
Greco claims that the state can take care of three people in their homes for the price of one person living in a nursing home.
So far, the program has only been implemented in three counties and is expanding this month into Philadelphia County.
Greco spoke to a crowd of 125 doctors, nurses and administrators as part of a joint Dean's Lecture for the Nursing School and the School of Medicine on Tuesday.
"These lectures are a medium for bringing in outside schools of thought from government and other institutions," Nursing Dean Afaf Meleis said.
Greco is quick to point out that everyone thought she was out of her mind a year ago when she agreed to leave her lucrative position as president of Corestates Financial to enter the bureaucratic world of the newly formed OHCR.
Aside from improving coordination, the office deals with issues of prescription drugs, uninsured and underinsured citizens, rising malpractice insurance and a nursing shortage.
