Factors influencing primary care organization commitment to technical assistance for pharmacist clinical services integration

Abstract

BackgroundWhile technical assistance (TA) has been utilized by primary care organizations (PCOs) for electronic health record installation and medical home recognition, little is known about PCOs’ use of TA to optimize pharmacist clinical services and integration in team-based care or population health programs. In 2019, the Connecticut Office of Health Strategy’s State Innovation Model Program funded a no-cost TA initiative for 9 PCOs to initiate and/or advance pharmacist clinical services. ObjectiveTo assess organizational, operational, and pharmacist factors that influenced PCO commitment to the TA program. MethodsDuring the TA program, data were collected from multiple sources including PCO demographic data; discussions and meetings with PCO medical, pharmacy, and administrative leaders; on-site workflow observations; and pharmacist coaching sessions.Configurational comparative methods were applied using the data collected during the TA program. Candidate factors were identified and calibrated on the basis of the researchers’ knowledge of the TA program, organizational readiness for change models, implementation science frameworks, and published literature. Each candidate factor was iteratively assessed until 13 factors were selected and calibrated by independently assigning each factor a dichotomous value across PCOs. Calibration differences between the researchers were discussed until consensus was reached. Solutions were modeled using the Coincidence Analysis (cna) package in R and RStudio (RStudio, PBC). ResultsOf the 9 PCOs, 4 committed to participating in the TA program. Only 1 factor, the presence of a hired pharmacist, consistently distinguished PCOs that committed from those that did not, with 100% coverage and 80% consistency. ConclusionPCO commitment to participate in the TA program was best explained by the factor of already having hired a pharmacist. These results can inform future efforts to engage PCOs in TA, primary care policy initiatives, and future research to understand factors influencing PCO success with pharmacist clinical services integration.