Tapping Into the True Potential of Pharmacy

The barrage of ads for direct-to-patient pharmacy services might cause you to wonder if we’re living in the golden age of pharmacy. And indeed, between app-driven services, individual-dosed packaging and home delivery, the pharmacy experience has never been more convenient. So why aren’t patient outcomes and costs keeping pace? With so much technological disruption and financial investment introduced in the pharmacy space, why aren’t we seeing better results?

Perhaps it’s because—despite the perceived ease we’ve built into the pharmacy experience—too many patients still struggle to take their medications as prescribed. Perhaps it’s because—despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investment—the health care industry has largely overlooked the role that pharmacists can play in supporting patients as they work to improve their health. 

Here’s the secret: Pharmacists can and want to do more

Unlocking the value of pharmacists begins by expanding the aperture to see them as more than gatekeepers to medications. When we support pharmacists as care providers and trust them to deliver personalized interventions, we start to discover new ways that pharmacists can and should play a greater role in improving the health of our country.

Consider, for example, the epidemic of medication nonadherence and the deeply troubling impact that has on public health today:

• ~50% of patients prescribed medications for chronic conditions can be qualified as nonadherent¹
• Avoidable medical costs as a result of non-adherence is estimated to approach $300 billion-- more than 30% of the total waste in the health care system² 
• The estimated annual cost of drug-related morbidity and mortality resulting from nonoptimized medication therapy is more than $500 billion (with a plausible upper range of more than $670 billion)³

The statistics clearly show a critical challenge in need of scalable solutions. But all the technological innovations in the world cannot meaningfully address the challenge if the innovations aren’t focused on more than convenience, access and reminders. 

Solving medication nonadherence requires a personal approach to care. Clinical expertise and individual empathy can combine to help patients identify the root causes of nonadherence and then partner with them to address each barrier. 

Empowered pharmacists can be the answer to this.

Creating a new normal for patient care and medication adherence 

All of this starts by overcoming the silos of the traditional care experience. Instead of pharmacists serving as the disconnected “next stop” after patients leave their doctor’s offices, a more innovative and impactful care model integrates physicians and pharmacist as part of a single care team. 

It sounds like a huge leap from the traditional care experience that occurs hundreds of thousands of times a day in our country… and it is. But more pointedly, wouldn’t that be a good thing? 

How many patients and physicians have simply been forced to accept that the care experience can only look like this—largely as a result of the way fee-for-service incentivizes patient volume over patient outcomes? This broken system, as depicted in the following graphic, comes with inevitable questions, uncertainty and time constraints that hinder patients’ ability to achieve their best health outcomes, right from the start.

Shouldn’t we instead strive for something that looks more like this?
 

Here we see a connected care experience that fosters closer provider-patient relationships with more engagement. We see more support delivered in every moment that matters, to help identify and remove barriers that stand between patients and their health.

Advanced offerings that deliver this model of care include clinical support and coordination to ensure that all medications work well for the patient, both individually and combined, and frequent check-ins from patients’ personal pharmacists to ensure patients feel heard and informed throughout their full health journey. 

Accessible, dedicated resources for questions, education and counsel represent pivotal drivers for medication adherence, because more often than not, patients don’t remember the instructions and notes they get from their providers. The flood of information, the emotion and anxiety that accompany new or updated diagnoses… none of this is conducive to retention of vital information. Particularly during an inpatient encounter, research finds that nearly half of all patients have difficulty remembering details from their hospital stays, including their diagnoses and changes in medication regimens.

Perhaps the best news in all this: The health care market’s large-scale shift to value-based care holds great promise to fund the adoption of a care model that just makes sense. Finally, the industry has begun to fully embrace a model that incentivizes patient health over patient volume and rewards those who deliver the personalized attention and care needed to produce positive outcomes.

Risk-bearing entities—particularly provider organizations that serve large populations of senior patients and chronic condition patients—have shown the most intense interest, as they look for novel ways to improve clinical markers and patient quality of life, while reducing total cost of care and operational burden for physicians and their staff. Connectivity to the right pharmacist-led adherence solution can be seen as a logical and relatively low-risk move with the potential for outsized returns, especially in scenarios where solution providers build their own revenue models around shared risk. 

All of this is far cry from what has passed for pharmacy innovation to-date. The future of pharmacy isn’t just hyper-digital and hyper-transactional. It remains founded on the principles of personal, relational care for patients and with physicians. We’re barely scratching the surface for the impact that pharmacists can have on health outcomes and experience nationally. 

If we can expand our collective belief about the role that pharmacists can play as part of connected care teams that align toward the health of patients, we can empower better health, change lives and finally bend the cost curve. Speaking on behalf of other, like-minded pharmacists and health care providers, we’re just getting started.