Pharmacist, Provider Team Efficient & Cost-Effective for Outpatient Cancer Therapy

A study presents at the ASH 2017 Annual Meeting and Exposition highlighted the benefits of a pharmacist-physician professional team in delivering outpatient cancer care.

“Increasing complexity of cancer care has resulted in a paradigm shift from individual clinician-based to a larger multidisciplinary team approach,” Ghada Zakout, FRCPath, MRCP, MBBS, of the London North West Healthcare Trust, and colleagues wrote. “Expectantly the chemotherapy specialist pharmacist role in delivering such complex therapies will fall short of demand in current care delivery models and has expanded beyond dispensing medications and medication counseling.”

The researchers said the aim of their study was to determine the impact of recently proposed care models that emphasize medicine optimization and development of integrated team care. In order to see how the models worked, they developed a joint pharmacists-physician multiprofessional team clinic.

During the study, they measured prevalence of adverse events, outcomes upon intervention to adverse events, prevalence of inappropriate prescriptions, polypharmacy, and wait times. They also calculated the financial impact on downstream revenue by measuring delays beyond 60 minutes and the cost of team presence. 

Study results showed that all 82 patients evaluated in the multiprofessional team clinic had an improvement in adverse events by at least one grade and 15 patients achieved complete recovery during the intervention period. Conversely, in the control group of 81 patients, eight had no improvement in adverse events and only seven patients achieved full recovery. 

The researchers noted that clinic wait times were significantly shorter in the intervention group, at a median of less than 30 minutes compared to 1 to 2 hours in the control group. Using this data they determined that the minimum cost-savings associated with the clinic $16,945.

“A collaborative pharmacist-physician multiprofessional team approach has demonstrated significant improvement in chemotherapy-related adverse events, reduced waiting times, enhanced patient experience, and translated to cost-savings to patients and the hospital,” Dr Zakout and colleagues concluded. “It has provided a proof of concept for a more robust, efficient and cost-effective model for cancer care delivery but also a platform for revenue generation.”— David Costill