What services does a community-centric pharmacy provide?
Community pharmacists serve as the first point of contact for many consumers who need health advice or access to care. They become frontline advisors – offering physical and mental health advice along with lifestyle counseling – and patient advocates – serving as intermediaries between patients and providers and insurance companies.
A community-centric approach to pharmacy consumer health and wellness often impacts holistic care through:
- Destigmatization: The ability to offer a more accessible, personalized consult involving community resources often makes the pharmacist an easier caregiver with whom to broach questions about sensitive conditions (like HIV, behavioral health, or obesity) or non-emergent care for uninsured or underinsured patients looking to avoid the ER.
- Cost consultation: Pharmacists can help patients with drug costs, connecting them to discounts, rebate programs, and alternative therapy options.
- Health equity: Community pharmacies are uniquely positioned to collaborate with local agencies and care centers to refer patients with access barriers to free health screenings, nutrition counseling, food vouchers, transportation services, or even housing support.
Pharmacies are opening up service lines to more clinical care and options beyond medication as their communities demonstrate more need. Some of the most prevalent and successful ways of bridging care gaps have included:
- Increasing immunization program offerings and becoming advocates for public health to impact disease prevention through vaccination campaigns.
- Expanding point-of-care screening to help providers co-manage chronic diseases, like diabetes and hypertension. Multiple studies found that pharmacist involvement helped improve various markers for patients with diabetes.
- Providing medication therapy management (MTM) services to help improve patient medication safety and reduce the likelihood of adverse drug events.
Technology helps pharmacists streamline community-centric workflows
Pharmacists are constantly being asked to do more with less, and while community-centric care helps bridge gaps in care among the pharmacy’s population, it also asks retail businesses to take on more services requiring more staff hours without sacrificing the pharmacy’s core business.
Concerns include strain on staff, additional workflows and data requirements, apprehensions that services won’t be adequately used, and worries that unconscious bias will interfere with equitable delivery of services.
Retail pharmacies need the right technology solutions and data to support and streamline their expanding workflows and provide consistency of evidence-based decision-making to support onboarding new staff and evolving roles and training of existing staff.
The UpToDate® and Medi-Span® suites of solutions from Wolters Kluwer are designed to help streamline professional workflows while delivering point-of-care access to continually updated and rigorously reviewed drug data, clinical decision support, and consumer education. Trusted, unified solutions are built to work together to keep pharmacy services aligned and consistent and to support interoperability with healthcare partners and community agencies that may be sharing patient data or health recommendations.
With precision, patient-specific, in-workflow drug safety alerts; digital consumer education; and fast searches of clinical evidence, pharmacists can save time and more quickly connect to key information they need to advise patients at the point of care.
Additionally, solutions that provide consistent, evidence-based content that takes into account the varying needs of diverse populations help pharmacists offer more inclusive and equitable community-based care that helps addresses issues of access and barriers to appropriate care.
