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Bridging the gap between the PPMI and the Medical Home Model

By Rachael Yim posted 05-26-2011 16:59

  
Bridging the gap between the pharmacy practice model initiative and the medical home model. Or is there really a gap? Or is the PPMI simply part of the medical home model?

I recently flew into LA this past week to attend my sister in law's physician assistant graduation at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona. There, an optometrist turned into politician- Senator Ed Hernandez gave the commencement speech. In his speech, he spoke about the changing of healthcare and how healthcare, in the future, with lack of physicians, will depend on the physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, etcera, to go above and beyond in our scope of practices.

He also spoke about how this is in line with the medical home model. My sister in law asked me about it after the graduation; what it meant and where we fit in. And I explained it- it's not an actual home per se, but more of the approach that we as healthcare professionals are striving for: providing more personalized care to the patient through a team of individuals making up their primary care team, preventing future costs associated with future hospital visits or extended stays. And we do so by expanding the ways that we practice, and creating newer technologies to merge our EMRs all together, through decreasing the costs for the patients by preventing hospital visits and errors from occurring and so on.

In addition (or contrast), there's the pharmacy practice model initiative. Here, in my setting at work, it's mentioned about every other day. Everyone wonders what kind of changes will be done and how it will change the view of the staff and specialist pharmacists alike, and how they will be viewed on the floor by the other healthcare professionals and patients. The PPMI is the hospital system pharmacy persepective of improving health system pharmacists role. More specifically, the PPMI, as defined by ASHP consists of "the goal of this initiative is to significantly advance the health and well being of patients by developing and disseminating a futuristic practice model that supports the most effective use of pharmacists as direct patient care providers." Quite similar to the medical home model, no?

The medical home model consists of a team of individuals acting as personalized physicians, so to say. Yet, it seems to be physician led.. with an unknown diverse team of healthcare professionals. Where do pharmacists fit into this mix? With the PPMI in place, I believe health system pharmacists can fit into this team. The thought is more of MTM/community pharmacists fitting into it, but with the PPMI, with health system pharmacy pushing to expand their role within the hospital, we too can be part of this medical home model... more on the outpatient setting per se (as the hospital visits would decrease with this model), but still, a valuable part of the medical home model. Or maybe we can work more along with community and retail pharmacists? Every now and then I may get a call from a retail pharmacy wondering about a patient allergy...but could we join together more, somehow, through this model and the PPMI?

Some even think that pharmacists in the retail setting can be the center of the medical home model... so how will this affect the health system, and can the PPMI of health system pharmacy and the community pharmacists within the medical home model merge together?

The future of pharmacy just keeps getting more and more exciting.



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