How PCMA Became the Gold Standard in Bill Tracking for Its Members

The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) advocates for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and supports access to quality prescription drug coverage for more than 289 million Americans who have health coverage from a variety of sponsors. PCMA works to educate lawmakers and influence state policy developments that could impact both the industry and patients across the U.S. 

Challenge: The Complexity of State-Level Policy Work

With a state affairs team of 14 people covering all 50 states, PCMA tracks approximately 1,500 bills across 10 issue areas at any given time. Randy Kane, the senior manager of state affairs at PCMA, supports the team’s legislative and regulatory work across the country. Staying ahead of state-level legislation — and keeping colleagues and members aligned — is nearly impossible without the right tools.

Solution: Using PolicyNote to Stay Ahead of Legislation

“PolicyNote keeps our entire team afloat from an operations standpoint,” Kane says. The platform serves as the hub for project management, bill tracking, trend analysis, and collaboration across the team.

Kane starts most days during legislative session by reviewing the Discovery Alerts he’s set up in PolicyNote. “PolicyNote has made it very easy to set up saved search alerts based on each policy issue area,” he says. One of his saved searches, for example, flags new legislation about pharmacy reimbursement changes, helping him track more than 200 bills on the topic.

From there, Kane flags relevant bills for colleagues, adds them to shared folders, and uses PolicyNote’s AI Assistant to generate summaries and impact bullet points. “It saves me an exponential amount of time finding and reviewing bills,” he says.

Results: Stronger Reporting, Faster Insights, and Time Saved

More Effective Internal and Member Reporting

Reporting on their efforts to members has become a core strength of the PCMA team thanks to PolicyNote. Kane uses the platform to create a weekly trend report that delivers new bill intel and policy analysis to PCMA members — a deliverable that’s easier and faster to produce using AI-powered search and summaries.

“We are the gold standard for legislative tracking in our industry, according to our members, and that wouldn’t be possible without PolicyNote,” he says.

Team members also pull state-specific reports directly from PolicyNote to use during weekly strategy calls, embedding the latest bill summaries, statuses, and maps into member emails. “That becomes the agenda,” Kane explains. “We’re not building agendas from scratch anymore.”

Executive Visibility with Critical Bill Dashboards

For PCMA’s senior vice president who leads the state affairs team, the ability to filter out legislative noise and focus on actual threats was critical. Kane and his team configured PolicyNote to send her an automated daily report of high-priority bills based on how the team is flagging and annotating legislation.

“She uses that information to build a dashboard that shows active threats, what’s failed, what’s been enacted — and can use that to brief the board and broader internal team,” Kane says. “We’ve never been able to do that before.”

Time Savings and Seamless Collaboration

The intuitive dashboard, personalized widgets, and centralized database have cut time spent tracking and sharing information by an additional 30 percent, compared to using legacy platform FiscalNote. “My dashboard shows only the data I need — the states I cover, committee hearings, maps — it’s all there the minute I log in,” Kane says. “It’s a huge time-saver.”

Why PolicyNote?

Kane has tried other platforms but says PolicyNote is the most flexible and intuitive for different user types: analysts, lobbyists, and executives alike.

“If you want a one-stop shop where all your data is housed and easily accessible so you can do the real legwork of your job, PolicyNote is it.” He adds: “It’s not just the platform — it’s the people. I’ve been able to give feedback in real time, and the engineering team has listened. There are widgets in PolicyNote today that started as my requests.”