(Management Case Study) Empowering Pharmacists: Unveiling the Support Staff Synergy in Ambulatory Care

Purpose: Support staff can play a vital role in helping ambulatory pharmacists fulfill their responsibilities and maximize their impact in patient care. Here are some key purposes for utilizing support staff in ambulatory pharmacy settings: 1.) Administrative assistance - such as scheduling appointments, 2.) Patient education and engagement, 3.) Quality improvement initiatives - Our support staff assist pharmacists in collecting data, tracking performance metrics, and participating in quality improvement initiatives, 4.) Interprofessional communication. By leveraging the skills and contributions of support staff, ambulatory pharmacists can effectively manage their workload, improve patient outcomes, and deliver high-quality pharmaceutical care to the community.

Methods: In the past year, our clinical support team went from non-existence to a new team of 8, which includes 7 non-pharmacist "patient support advocates" and 1 "clinical support pharmacist". It made the most sense to organize the team into geographical regions within the Cleveland-Akron metro area. Each support staff member coordinates with a group of 7-10 pharmacists within their region. The support staff will log into a call center where patients are directed to call to schedule visits, address medical concerns and follow up with questions they may have. Each support staff's primary responsibility is to schedule patients within their region. Additionally, the support team will start the administrative process of enrolling patients into our health system's internal patient assistance program. This program allows with 340b utility to provide patients with the opportunity to get almost any name branded medication for free delivered to their house at no cost. Patients will provide financial proof of the program qualifications to our support staff for enrollment. Our support staff also coordinates within offices in their region to send referral requests to providers identified by our population health team's internal software system. Lastly, our clinical support pharmacist may triage more urgent same day concerns that established patients may bring forward including stock shortages, uncontrolled conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and side effect related questions.

Results: Our patient support advocates are scheduling 300 appointments per day. Additionally, over 2000 patients have been enrolled in our internal patient assistance program. Through coordination of our population health department, our support staff has been able to get providers to self-refer over 200 patients each month that have a chronic condition such as COPD, Asthma, CVA, CHF, DM or CKD. Our clinical support pharmacist has been a great relief to our over 40 clinical pharmacists on the team. Each day our clinical support pharmacists triages multiple situations that allow our main pharmacists the opportunity to provide uninterrupted patient care.

Conclusion: Our department's support staff has played a vital role in helping our ambulatory team. Through this organized effort, over two thousand patients have been enrolled in our internal patient assistance program. Additionally, over three hundred patients each day are scheduled within our pharmacy telehealth clinic. Additionally, over two hundred patients each month are identified by our support team with coordination of the population health team to have a pharmacist assist with patient care.