Opportunities and responsibilities for pharmacists to improve their effectiveness in addressing medication adherence through culturally sensitive collaborations with community health workers.

Objectives: Despite progress in addressing health disparities among vulnerable populations, minority populations are at risk for chronic health conditions associated with multiple determinants of health, which affects their health status and access to care. We offer a potential solution, which creates an unconventional medical team between a pharmacist and a community health worker (CHW). We explore weaknesses and challenges in our medication use system in the context of adherence as a drug therapy problem, the role of culture in shaping medication use, and finally offer a unique paradigm for a collaborative interprofessional team consisting of CHWs and pharmacists.

Benzodiazepines and injury: a risk adjusted model.

Background: Benzodiazepines (BZD) are one class of medications that are generally acknowledged to be a risk factor for injuries.

Objective: Our objective was to link outpatient prescription data with clinical data in order to develop a risk adjusted binary model that associates BZD usage with the risk for a healthcare encounter for an injury.

Methods: In total, 3 years of outpatient BZD prescription data, totaling 133 872 outpatient BZD prescriptions for 13 745 patients for a VA medical center, were combined with data from inpatient and outpatient administrative databases.