Tools for Managing Multiple Disease States Without Burning Out: Lindsey Valenzuela, PharmD

Value-based care environments are a “perfect opportunity” for pharmacists to manage several layers of disease in 1 setting, according to Lindsey Valenzuela, PharmD, APh, BCACP, vice president of population health integration at Desert Oasis Healthcare, . For example, patients with diabetes may also have cardiovascular issues, and having a single pharmacist involved in the patient’s care can help expedite communication and reduce care gaps.

But how do pharmacists take on this responsibility without getting overwhelmed?

Valenzuela told The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®) that smart infrastructure and remote monitoring can make this workload manageable. Tools such as algorithm-driven dashboards and cellularly enabled glucometers help pharmacists focus on the right patients at the right time, boosting both efficiency and outcomes.

“[Patients] with the highest priority rise to the top based on the algorithms from the input of their remote patient monitoring data,” she explained. “We can address really the right patient at the right time, which makes us more effective.”

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Does having 1 pharmacist manage multiple disease states increase their workload?

Putting all of those disease states on 1 pharmacist can seem like a burden. But when you are in a position to make changes and improvements to the medication profile for numerous different disease states, there's a lot less time spent going back and forth to different specialists and primary cares to decide if that's something that you can do. You don't spend as much time on the back-and-forth of the provider communication. You can simply make the changes and notify the other providers and the team.

The other piece for us—and because, again, we're in a value-based care organization—is we're a medical group, so we provide a number of opportunities for patients under that medical benefit. One example is glucometers and diabetic supplies. That's assigned as a medical benefit to a lot of members, which means that we as an organization are financially supposed to provide that to patients, to coordinate that.

Because we have members that were managing their diabetes in the pharmacist programs, we can use the volume of patients that we're managing to get contracting on cellularly enabled glucometers. So now you have a remote patient monitoring tool that you can feed all of that data live into your system, and now you don't need to bring that patient into the office, which reduces the amount of time that the pharmacist is spent face-to-face with the patient, gathering information, and then making a decision.

You've made the pharmacist more efficient with the information that is now provided to them from the patient's home. We use a tool that takes in this information and helps to prioritize patient care, almost like a stoplight: red, yellow, green. Those with the highest priority rise to the top based on the algorithms from the input of their remote patient monitoring data, and so we can address really the right patient at the right time, which makes us more effective.

Yes, it can be burdensome to have a pharmacist overseeing a number of different disease states unless you have tools surrounding the pharmacists to make them more efficient.