Newswise — Voices debating health care reform may want to pay more attention to pharmacists to help reduce costs, advance electronic records, and better link separate health systems, says Cynthia Boyle, PharmD, FAPhA, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.
At a recent Health Care Reform Forum for students and faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, featuring U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes, Boyle said pharmacists understand that “the most expensive medication is often the one that does not work.”
Adverse medication events cost the health system more than $177 billion a year. Improved coordination of health care providers with pharmacists to better monitor medications could eliminate much of that cost, said Boyle.
She added that the growing population of patients requiring chronic care now consumes 75 cents of every health care dollar. Pharmacists provide chronic disease management programs that promote patient wellness, reduce costs, and prevent medication errors.
Boyle said it is “uniquely the pharmacists’ role to get the right medicines to people, but also to monitor what happens, or how [the patients] improve or how [the medicines] have to be modified.”
Pharmacists can help bring down costs and better educate the public on health care, she said, because, “we are the most accessible health care providers of all.” Pharmacists should be called upon to improve the quality and safety of medication use and patient access to pharmacist services, she said.
Boyle was honored as the “2002 Pharmacist of the Year” by the Maryland Society of Health System Pharmacists and has long been an active leader in the Maryland Pharmacists Association. As director of experiential learning at the School of Pharmacy, she seeks to develop leadership in student pharmacists for their future roles as advocates for patients, the profession, and public health.
Pharmacists need to have a central role in the quality and safety of medication use, said Boyle. “People need to understand how to use their medication and medical devices and health care providers need to know what someone is taking and have a thorough picture of that. We know how challenging just reconciling medications between health systems and community practice can be. There is a huge need for medication reconciliation.”
Pharmacists are very accessible for education and prevention, which are part of safety, said Boyle, and there should be pay for performance standards for pharmacists and to all health professionals.
Pharmacists also can help on the part of the debate where there is bipartisan consensus—digitizing and standardizing medical records. “Pharmacists may be the most computerized of all the health professions,” said Boyle. However, pharmacists most often don’t have access to laboratory data or even diagnosis codes that would help their patients make better use of their medications. “That’s essential,” said Boyle, to helping pharmacists as a key player in health care.
For improving health care, Boyle emphasized the word is “interoperable.” When each type of medical profession is operating within stand-alone systems in the current health care industry, “How do we know what medication a patient’s on? How do the various caregivers really know how to make the best decision?” she questioned. “It’s really easy to add a medication, when [sometimes] the best decision may be to decrease the dose of another one. This is really critical so there is an appropriate flow of medication.”
Boyle indicated that her advice can be boiled down to a quote from "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” an Institute of Medicine 2000 report, “Because of the immense complexity and variety of medications now available … the pharmacist has become an essential resource. And thus access to his or her expertise must be possible at all times.”
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