Utilizing pharmacy technicians for medication adherence patient outreach in an ambulatory care setting.

Purpose: This publication outlines the development and implementation of a telephone-based adherence call program for pharmacy technicians at Community Health Network (CHNw). This program aims to improve medication adherence rates for contracted Medicare Advantage plans.

Summary: As healthcare systems look for ways to improve patient care, Medicare reimbursement can guide ideas for initiatives. To improve medication adherence rates, the ambulatory care pharmacy team at CHNw developed a telephone-based adherence call system to better improve clinical outcomes and lower overall healthcare utilization and costs. Initially developed as a pharmacy student-driven service, the program has progressed to be run by clinical pharmacy technicians. Once patients are identified as candidates for outreach, the pharmacy technicians contact them to discuss medication adherence and coordinate with their primary care provider and embedded clinic pharmacist to ensure medication accessibility and overcome potential barriers to adherence.

Conclusion: Utilizing pharmacy technicians to complete medication adherence outreach calls has proven to be a success, as evidenced by improvement in star ratings in all 3 CMS medication adherence measures. This has resulted in work off-loaded from the clinical pharmacist, financial gain for the network, and improved medication adherence for patients. With this success, we can financially justify having the technicians on the ambulatory pharmacy team and plan to expand their roles into other pharmacy initiatives soon.  This program helps show that expanding the pharmacy technician role may further benefit the healthcare system.