Development of an innovative partnership between a health-system department of pharmacy and external community pharmacies.

Abstract

Our organization implemented a health-system pharmacy/community pharmacy transitions of care (TOC) program, developing a scalable model to improve care transitions from the health system to the community setting for shared patients. In this report, we describe our organization's experiences in taking a purposeful approach to building and pilot testing a partnership between our department of pharmacy and 14 community pharmacies within a larger statewide network to improve TOC across care settings. We have been successful in partnering with our electronic health record (EHR) vendor to enhance access capabilities to allow for documentation by community pharmacists (external to the organization) to be included in the patient record as a note. The goal of the partnership with community pharmacies is to elevate TOC for patients, identify and resolve medication therapy problems that may occur post discharge and lead to poor outcomes, and improve continuity of care across practice settings. Our department of pharmacy has led a successful initiative to promote collaboration with local external community pharmacies. This program has led to innovative advancements in EHR capabilities, promoting transparency in the documentation of pharmacy services and making this documentation visible to all care team members.