Pharmacist-Physician Integration Crucial to Comprehensive Medication Management

A poster presented at the ASHP’s 2017 Summer Meetings and Exhibition outlined the strategies crucial to a successful pharmacist-physician integrated comprehensive medication management (CMM) program.

The researchers sought to “identify and describe strategies that have successfully achieved collaboration among physicians and pharmacists providing CMM support development of CMM services.”

Kyle Turner, PharmD, an assistant professor in the department of pharmacotherapy at the University of Utah, and colleagues developed a two-phase study that combined quantitative and qualitative measurements to identify the most
successful pharmacist-physician collaboration strategies. 

The first phase of the study was designed to identify strategies for building better pharmacist-physician relationships using qualitative approaches. They utilized an advisory group of pharmacists with experience building CMM to develop a list of minimum criteria that would work as a benchmark for positive pharmacist-led CMM relationships. The researchers then conducted semistructured interviews with pharmacists to gather empirical data on criteria.

During phase 2 of the study, the researchers distributed a survey to ambulatory care pharmacists in order to determine the impact of strategies to facilitate better pharmacist-physician relationships. They used data from a total of 104 respondents 

The researchers identified 33 strategies which they classified into nine themes, including, “creating a presence in clinic, making personal connections, tailoring relationship building efforts to individual physicians, laying a relationship foundation, being a strong clinician, purposefully sharing patient care, showing respect and managing conflict, and integrating into clinic.”

Results showed that the most commonly used and most effective strategies were being consistently available for questions related to medication, proactively engaging in pharmacy discussions, having confidence in clinical skills, being reliable as a clinician, and verbalizing clinical decision making. 

Among the strategies identified as extremely helpful at improving CMM were “focusing on early adopting physicians,” and “being collegial and showing professional respect.”

“Effective strategies to develop pharmacist-physician relationships in the delivery of CMM were identified and ranked by experienced practitioners in terms of perceived influence,” Dr Turner and colleagues wrote “Strategies presented in this format can provide more precise guidance to those practitioners and learners initiating CMM services, accelerating the time required to establish strong collaborative relationships with physician colleagues.” —David Costill