Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2020 : Issue #1089 |
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Letter from the Editor
 I was discussing the role of pharmacists in primary care offices with our intern, Melinda Rodriguez, PharmD Candidate 2021, LECOM College of Pharmacy. I was sharing my past experience of working for primary care physicians to help manage diabetes patients. About 12 years ago, Pfizer had developed a guide for pharmacists to work in a shared office visit scenario, where they could be paid by the extra income generated by a physician for a complex office visit. I was able to do this with 6 offices and with a couple of other pharmacists; we had a total of 11. We worked this for about 3 years and it was beneficial to the patients and to the prescriber, as well as we pharmacists.
I often look back on the reason these programs ended, and I concluded two things. First, it became difficult for the prescribers to see our generation of income. The payments to the physician were on one big check that was not often assigned to each patient account while the office had to write a check to us for our services, so it was almost impossible to see if we were “earning our keep.” Secondly, although we could show improved outcomes for these patients, there were no peer reviewed studies showing this was true.
This week, Dr. Rodriguez has brought us an article that may just change all that. Check out Improving Medication Adherence in Primary Care to find out how you could benefit from a pharmacist and make more money.
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We can make a difference!
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Dave Joffe
Editor-in-chief |
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