The UT-HIP Texas Pharmaceutical Initiative (TPI) Project has just completed its first year of operation.
TPI is an effort to rethink how prescription drugs are acquired, distributed, prescribed, and dispensed in the state of Texas.
- The project has 27+ and counting workplans, 52+ people working on the project across UT institutions and Texas A&M, and 40+ subspecialty clinical pharmacists and physicians at any given time serving on clinical workgroups to research evidence-based therapeutics and population health management.
- Three clinical workgroups have met and are finalizing their recommendations in Rheumatology, Dermatology, and Gastroenterology, and workgroups in Endocrinology, focused on diabetes and obesity, and a combined workgroup between Neurology and Emergency Medicine is addressing headaches and migraines.
- Recruitment of subspecialty clinical pharmacists and physicians are underway for five more workgroups for Fall 2026.
- The technical and analytics teams have imported over 100M+ medical and prescription drug claims from ERS, TRS, TAMU, and UT System into the secure HITRUST UT-HIP data infrastructure, with meta data from five large commercial data sets.
- Advanced analytics and modeling are being run and reviewed biweekly with ERS, TRS, TAMU, and UT System health plan management and TPI leadership.
- PBM and prescription drug supply chain market analyses are underway to review all aspects of the prescription drug channel, including work in drug quality with TAMU and in drug shortage.
- The UT-HIP TPI Project, in partnership with TPI leadership, delivered the first core TPI deliverable, a revised business plan, to the Texas Legislature on June 1 of this year.
- Upcoming deliverables are in the early and late Fall of 2026.
If there is interest in learning more or in joining one of the UT-HIP TPI Project teams, please reach out to Mike Johnsrud PhD RPh (mjohnsrud@austin.utexas.edu) or Rick Peters MD (rick.peters@austin.utexas.edu).
