Coordinated pharmacist-led outreach, e-consults, and continuous glucose monitoring support improve diabetes outcomes, increase guideline-based therapy use, and impact total cost of care.
In an interview with Pharmacy Times, Elizabeth Senior, PharmD, senior clinical pharmacy specialist with UPMC Health Plan, and Esra Karslioglu-French, MD, MBA, clinical chief of the Division of Endocrinology at UPMC, described how coordinated health plan–provider collaboration supports diabetes management from patient identification through ongoing care.
Senior explained that the process begins with predictive analytics to identify patients who may benefit from pharmacist intervention. Pharmacists then conduct outreach to assess individual needs, address medication-related problems, and coordinate with providers to optimize therapy. Patients are also offered additional resources, as appropriate, including diabetes disease management programs, lifestyle coaching, and certified diabetes care and education specialists, with follow-up interactions helping to ensure continuity of care.
Karslioglu-French highlighted the targeted automatic e-consult program as a model for proactive, specialist-driven support. Using clinical analytics, high-risk patients with uncontrolled diabetes are identified, and endocrinologists provide treatment recommendations to primary care providers ahead of visits. When technologies such as continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are recommended, pharmacists play a central role in device initiation, remote monitoring, and medication adjustments based on established protocols.
Both experts emphasized observed improvements associated with this coordinated approach, including improvements in hemoglobin A1C; increased adoption of guideline-directed therapies such as sodium-glucose transport protein 2 inhibitors, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, and CGMs; and favorable trends in unplanned health care utilization and total cost of care. Senior added that ongoing program refinement is driven by analysis of engagement strategies and outcomes, which informs innovations such as telehealth-based “Ask a Pharmacist” services to improve accessibility.
