Community pharmacist-led intervention to identify persons with diabetes not on statin therapy

Abstract

Objectives: To demonstrate the effectiveness of a community pharmacist-led intervention to identify persons with diabetes not receiving statin therapy.

Setting: Five pharmacy locations within 1 district of a chain community pharmacy.

Practice description: Walgreens Pharmacy is a national retail chain community pharmacy with global affiliations. Walgreens Pharmacy locations use clinical pharmacy services to provide complete quality patient care.

Practice innovation: A pharmacist intervention workflow model and screening algorithm for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Statin Use in Persons with Diabetes quality measure were developed to identify measure-eligible patients in a community pharmacy setting. This new measure was implemented within the Electronic Quality Improvement Platform for Plans and Pharmacies (EQuIPP) dashboard. The study aimed to demonstrate that community pharmacist intervention is effective for helping to close therapy gaps; the focus of this study was identifying patients who have diabetes but are not on statin therapy.

Evaluation: The primary outcome included the percentage of patients flagged for intervention by the pharmacist, and the secondary outcome included the number of statin prescriptions received for the measure-eligible intervention population.

Results: At study initiation, EQuIPP reported a total of 103 patients were SUPD measure eligible at the intervention pharmacies (combined). After the 90-day study duration, 29.1% (n = 30) of SUPD measure-eligible patients were identified with the use of the workflow intervention. From those identified, 40% (n = 12) gave verbal consent for the pharmacist to intervene with their physician, and of those, 58.3% (n = 7) received statin prescriptions. Pharmacy A increased their EQuIPP-based performance measure by 3.3%, Pharmacy B 4.2%, Pharmacy D 2.4%, and Pharmacy E 3.5%, and Pharmacy C decreased by 1.0%.

Conclusion: Implementation of a community pharmacist-led identification process successfully identified SUPD measure-eligible patients. Community pharmacist-led intervention resulted in an increase in the number of statin prescriptions written for measure-eligible patients.