Pharmacists and Patient Care

Matthew Pickering, PharmD, RPh, PQA Senior Director of Research & Quality Strategies at Pharmacy Quality Alliance discusses what pharmacists bring to patient care in the Pharmacy Quality Alliance Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD.

Matthew Pickering, PharmD: The 2 key nodes within this framework around pharmacy dispensing, or medication dispensing, and also adherence. Pharmacists are embedded within these communtiies, they have a lot of interaction and high touch points with patients that may have social determinants of health issues or unmet needs. If there are screening tools that health plans are trying to utilize to better understand the 360 picture of the patient, with the social determinants of health as well as medical conditions and comorbidities, there's ways that pharmacies can actually engage those patients and screen for these types of issues as well as provide connections to community programs if there are things such as social isolation or food insecurity.