From Dispenser to Indispensable: Equipping Pharmacists for Patient Care

Pharmacists are more than medication experts. They’re frontline care providers, too, and increasingly so. Here’s how to support their expanding role in team-based, patient-centered care.

Pharmacists do more than put pills in bottles.

They help provide care to patients, and they have an important role in making healthcare accessible. I emphasize that word because that’s what pharmacists themselves are—accessible—and this means access to timely, affordable, high-quality care.

But to fully realize this potential, pharmacists need access to the patient’s medical history, and they need a way to coordinate care with other providers. That requires access to technology that supports the seamless exchange of clinical information.

In short, it’s about connecting pharmacists into the broader care team.

Pharmacy Interoperability Can’t Wait

It can’t wait, as I wrote in a post for The Sequoia Project in September, where I lead the Pharmacy Workgroup with Pooja Babbrah of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP).

As a guest on our podcast in 2024, Babbrah said that pharmacy plays such a big role in patient outcomes, but when we talk about interoperability, it’s mostly about data sharing among doctors, health plans and patients. What we haven’t been talking about, she said, is how we bring the pharmacist into the care team.

Now, through the Pharmacy Workgroup, that’s what we’re doing: We’re helping the industry better understand (1) what it means to have the entire care team connected and (2) why pharmacists need to access and share information with other providers and payers.

What It Means to Have the Entire Care Team Connected

Our recent survey data underscores the importance of connection and how that supports the expanding role of pharmacists in team-based care, particularly when it comes to time.

To be specific, it’s the lack of time that matters here. In fact, 40% of pharmacists cited lack of time as their biggest challenge on any given day. And it wasn’t just pharmacists who said so: 23% of prescribers also cited lack of time as their biggest daily challenge.

Advancing pharmacy interoperability is critical to eliminating manual tasks and freeing up the entire care team to spend more time focused on patient care. And this matters because as pharmacists are being deployed in more settings to maximize their impact, the lack of time only gets in the way.

Why Pharmacists Need to Access & Share Information

A trifecta of forces is fueling the impact pharmacists are having on patient care:

1. Scope of practice is expanding to align with pharmacists’ education and training, including test-to-treat and prescribing authority.
2. Reimbursement policies increasingly require that pharmacists be compensated for work they do in their expanding roles.
3. Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs) are coming online nationwide, which together form a kind of “network of networks,” and make it easier to exchange information.

This trifecta translates to patient access. But to make patient access a reality, pharmacists themselves need access to information and the ability to share it.

These technologies enable this kind of access, and all within existing workflows:

• Real-time updates between prescribers and pharmacies facilitate e-prescribing without faxes and phone calls.
• Direct messaging enables the flow of time-sensitive communications, including immunization notifications, medication therapy management and provider questions.
• Prior authorization automation eliminates much of the work of managing requests.

All this frees time and energy for pharmacists to provide high-value services that keep patient care on track.