Providing Value to Health Care Teams

Todd D. Sorensen, PharmD, FAPhA, FCCP, discusses the value of pharmacists on an interprofessional team of health care providers. Sorensen is a professor and Dean for Strategic initiatives and Innovation, University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy, and the incoming President of American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). This video was filmed at the 2019 AACP Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Todd D. Sorensen, PharmD, FAPhA, FCCP: The value of a pharmacist on an interprofessional team—I always frame that around the quadruple aim, because we are finding that pharmacists bring value to each element of that. So that’s improving the health of patients, we look at changes in health care markers, quality markers. There’s also the aspect of reducing cost: Pharmacists integrated into a team help break down or control the cost of health care. When we look at patient satisfaction scores, when they have an opportunity to really work with the pharmacist as a part of a team, they’re usually sky-high in terms of their satisfaction. And then finally, 1 of the things that we’re really just started to emerge, is that when you put a pharmacist working in collaboration with a physician, we’re starting to see evidence that it actually positively effects physician work life, and that’s an important issue for them because burnout joining practice is becoming quite a significant issue. And if we can demonstrate the value of a pharmacist across all 4 of those dimensions, it becomes much easier to make the value proposition that the pharmacist really needs to be a critical member of an integrated team.