PHARMACIST’S ROLE IN POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT

To recognize the importance of medication management in patient-care outcomes and the vital role of pharmacists in population health management; further,

To encourage healthcare organizations to engage pharmacists and pharmacy leaders in identifying appropriate patient cohorts, anticipating their healthcare needs, and implementing the models of care that optimize outcomes for patients and the healthcare organization; further,

To encourage the development of complexity index tools and resources to support the identification of high-risk, high-cost, and other patient cohorts to facilitate patient-care provider panel determinations and workload balancing; further,

To promote collaboration among members of the interprofessional healthcare team to develop meaningful measures of individual patient and population care outcomes; further,

To advocate for education to prepare pharmacists for their role in population health management.

Rationale

As hospital and health systems become larger and adjust to new payment models (e.g., readmissions penalties and reduced Medicare payments), the need for health-system and pharmacy leaders to determine the safest, most efficient, and most economical way to care for identified patient populations has become a significant challenge. Pharmacists have an important role in managing medication therapies for individual patients as well as participating in the development of care models for patient populations with the interprofessional teams they work within. The utilization of “big data” by health systems is a growing domain of research, and it will be important for pharmacists and pharmacy leaders to make use of this information when developing strategic plans and resource allocations. Similar to the workload and productivity issues traditionally facing hospital leaders, the need to stratify total patient populations, anticipate their healthcare resource needs, and then assign the best site and model of care to obtain the ideal return on investment for both the patient and organization has become of paramount importance. The need for identifying the ideal patient panel sizes and the demographics of these panels will be important for patients and pharmacists as pharmacists practice more in the ambulatory care environment. To accomplish these goals, pharmacists will require education to prepare for their role in population health management.