Branded

Here’s a fact that keeps health plan administrators and anyone else responsible for budgeting health costs awake at night: 1-in-5 hospital patients ends up back in the hospital within 30 days of their discharge. And the biggest factors pulling them back all have to do with medications — either through medication errors, nonadherence or adverse drug events.

Left to right: Alexa Mitchell and Holly Moore, both second-year pharmacy students at Washington State University
College of Pharmacy, work with clinical assistant professor Kimberly McKeirnan, PharmD, to deliver health screenings
at a local Albertsons pharmacy.

For decades, the pharmacy profession labored under a widespread, but inaccurate, public perception of pharmacists as little more than dispensers of prescription medicines and givers of basic counseling on their use. No more. Pharmacists today are highly trained, clinically engaged patient-care specialists making a huge and rapidly growing impact on population health management in communities all over America.

The future of American health care could be summed up in one word — “connection.” To thrive in a fast-reforming healthcare system that demands better patient outcomes at a lower cost, pharmacies, physicians, hospitals, health systems, outpatient clinicians and diagnosticians are going to have to connect much more effectively, both with one another and with the patients they serve.