Objective: To examine the sensitivity and criterion validity of the 14-item Physician/Pharmacist Collaboration Index (PPCI).
Design: Substudy of an unblinded, randomized trial of pharmacist interventions with patients with uncontrolled hypertension.
Setting: 6 intervention and 6 control pharmacies in eastern Iowa.
Participants: 25 community pharmacists.
Interventions: Pharmacists completed the PPCI at baseline and at a 3-month follow-up for each patient's physician.
Main outcome measures: Respondents' perceptions about their relationships with each patient's physicians as measured through scores in three domains, Trustworthiness (TW; score range, 6-42), Role Specification (RS, 5-35), Relationship Initiation (RI, 3-21), and compared using nonparametric tests.
Results: Pharmacists' mean scores of their relations with 38 different physicians (54 completed PPCIs) in the intervention group were 33.8 for TW, 23.2 for RS, and 16.4 for RI at baseline. At 3 months, the scores had improved significantly to 35.5, 25.0, and 17.4, respectively. Pharmacists' scores for 43 different physicians (49 completed PPCIs) in the control group did not change significantly between baseline and 3 months (TW, 30.7 at each time point; RS, 20.3 and 19.7, respectively; RI, 14.3 at each time point).
Conclusion: Improved scores in the intervention group suggest that collaborative relations improved between the physician and pharmacist during the 3-month study, while no such improvement was found in the control group. Since the intervention was designed to promote collaboration between pharmacists and physicians, these results support the PPCI as a tool to measure pharmacist-physician collaboration and could be used by pharmacists to benchmark collaborative relationships. Additional research is needed to corroborate the results of this study.