Effect on institutional revenue of clinical pharmacy services in an ambulatory care clinic

Abstract

There is currently a need to focus on how pharmacists can be incorporated into a sustainable practice while generating revenue for an institution. An institutional perspective on cost has not yet been evaluated for ambulatory clinical pharmacy services. A long-standing ambulatory care clinic at the University of Mississippi Medical Center has provided direct ambulatory clinical pharmacy services with collaboration from internal medicine physicians. This clinic incorporates the pharmacist as an integral component of the disease management process, allowing both a physician and a pharmacist to provide services, often simultaneously, at a visit. Due to unexpected changes in physician collaboration, the ability to meaningfully evaluate revenue differences between physician-only and physician–pharmacist collaborative clinic models in a similar population and location was possible in 2011. We performed a retrospective evaluation of anticipated revenue and relative value units (RVUs), a measurement originally developed by Medicare to guide reimbursements and assign value to clinical services.1,2