Transforming Health Care from Volume to Value: Targeting Essential Therapies for Improved Health.

The healthcare landscape is evolving rapidly due to escalating costs from the traditional fee-for-service model. Value-based care has emerged as a viable solution, and initiatives focus on areas prone to overuse, waste, or high costs, such as advanced imaging and avoidable acute care resource utilization. Improving medication use is an important component of this work, and it requires organizational commitment, interdisciplinary collaboration, and targeted strategies for specific therapeutic areas.

Expansion of inpatient clinical pharmacy services through reallocation of pharmacists.

Purpose: The redesign of an inpatient pharmacy practice model through reallocation of pharmacy resources in order to expand clinical services is described.

Methods: A pharmacy practice model change was implemented at a nonprofit academic medical center to meet the increasing demand for direct patient care services. In order to accomplish this change, the following steps were completed: reevaluation of daily tasks and responsibilities, reallocation of remaining tasks to the most appropriate pharmacy staff member, determination of the ideal number of positions needed to complete each task, and reorganization of the model into a collection of teams.

Development and implementation of a postdischarge home-based medication management service.

Purpose: The development and implementation of a postdischarge home-based, pharmacist-provided medication management service are described.

Summary: A work group composed of pharmacy administrators, clinical specialists, physicians, and nursing leadership developed the structure and training requirements to implement the service. Eligible patients were identified during their hospital admission by acute care pharmacists and consented for study participation.