Medication Therapy Management Practices Among Kansas Pharmacists, 2016 Kansas Pharmacy Practice Innovative Survey

BACKGROUND: Pharmacists are the key players in forming community- clinical linkages to enhance coordination, resource sharing, referral and tracking systems to improve chronic conditions management. The 2016 Kansas Pharmacy Practice Innovation Survey (KPS) was conducted to collect information about pharmacists’ current practices to assist patients in accessing community resources to prevent or manage chronic disease. The survey assessed the adoption of approaches to support hypertension and diabetes medication therapy management (MTM) and patient self-management (PSM. This survey was part of the efforts toward strengthening implementation of pharmacist and physician collaborative agreements to promote MTM and multi-disciplinary team approach for patient care in Kansas and inform performance measures for the Kansas Chronic Disease Programs.

METHODS: The Kansas Board of Pharmacy provided a list of all pharmacies in Kansas with mailing addresses. The KPS was mailed to all Kansas pharmacies. An electronic version of the questionnaire was also made available. The pharmacist-in-charge was asked to complete the survey. Pharmacy’s license number was used to identify survey records to prevent duplicate responses. Responses to mail-in-survey were added to the electronic survey data and a single combined dataset was created. Detailed analyses of data from combined dataset were performed using SAS 9.3 software. Veterinary pharmacies, pharmacies that do not dispense medication and do not have direct patient contact were excluded from the final analyses. 

RESULTS: Out of 899 eligible pharmacies, 330 pharmacies completed the survey for a response rate of 37 percent. Approximately two-third of respondents indicated they provide MTM service with feedback to patient and patient’s physician. Approximately 90 percent reported educating patients on the importance of following prescribed medication regimen and encouraging patients to maintain regular physician visits. 56 percent of respondents reported recommending patient to do home self-monitoring of blood pressure and glucose level. Fifty percent of the respondents have collaborative agreements with physicians for the immunization protocol, but very few have agreements for other areas.

CONCLUSIONS: The KPS results showed that considerable number of pharmacists are working on approaches to promote MTN and PSM and can partner in improving the clinical outcomes for hypertension and diabetes patients. Kansas chronic disease progams will use the results to reach out to pharmacists to build partnerships and develop clinical-community linkages between pharmacists and health care providers to promote awareness of high blood pressure and diabetes among patients, to engage more pharmacies to promote PSM, and to improve quality of care and clinical outcomes among chronic disease patients.