Engaging Patients Leads to Earned Revenue
Discover how an independent pharmacy elevated patient care with EQUIPP’s Enhanced Services and significantly boosted business financials.
Since 2020, Shelyn Davis, PharmD, Owner of Community Care Rx in Malvern, AR, is focused on delivering quality patient care to her community. Her pharmacy remains busy with a staff of 23 employees to handle almost 1,000 prescriptions daily.
Samantha Pennington, PharmD, Pharmacist Manager at Community Care Rx is the clinical pharmacist and quality care champion on staff that utilizes EQUIPP to complete Enhanced Services offered by the pharmacy. By focusing on payer sponsored, clinical gap closure programs, the pharmacy team is conducting services with patients and earning revenue in the process.
Davis states about her pharmacy team, “We with all of my employees, I try to find what they do well and let them do it. Samantha has a love for the clinical side of pharmacy.” Davis adds, “I just open the door and I’ll let her have as much reign as she wants with it. I think, if I’m successful, then that’s the reason I would say I am.”
Improving Patient Adherence Improves EQUIPP Scores
Samantha Pennington credits implementing medication synchronization (med sync) in May of last year as a key factor in increasing their EQUIPP performance scores.
Pennington explained, “I went to EQUIPP and looked at the list of patients, downloaded that list, then compiled who were our outliers by different categories, and then made a category in our computer system.” She added, “That’s who we targeted at first to enroll into our Med Sync program.”
This strategic change significantly improved patient adherence and population-level scores. Additionally, they consistently prioritize EQUIPP and similar programs by checking refreshed data weekly and targeting patients by grouping them in their system for easier communication about adherence and health outcomes. Recently, hiring a technician dedicated to these programs has further helped, allowing Samantha to focus on clinical aspects while the technician handles administrative tasks like data compilation.
Working with Enhanced Services in EQUIPP
Samantha Pennington explains how she uses her point of sale system for Enhanced Services in EQUIPP: “For LAMP (Longitudinal Adherence Monitoring Program) and those where we targeted them (patients) through our med sync program… as soon as I got that list, I put them on that program, did the quarterly reviews, and was able to manage them that way. For the blood pressure program, I created a facility in our (system).”
For their blood pressure program, Samantha created a designated “alert” within their pharmacy management system, and directed a technician to add relevant patients to this functionality. To prompt action, Samantha added a “blood pressure” note to patient labels, alerting cashiers to direct these patients to a pharmacist while at the point of care. She then trained the pharmacists to discuss blood pressure with patients using EQUIPP talking points while conducting the screenings for payment by the payer.
The pharmacy staff is busy, so implementing Enhanced Services into the pharmacy workflow requires allotting time for documentation, but it shouldn’t be difficult.
Pennington agrees, “It’s very easy to do, to document. I think the hardest part is like getting that data to a place where you can utilize it. So once you have the data, documenting it takes minutes. I mean, very, very easy to do. Now compiling the data may take like 30 minutes a week.”
Patient Response, New Programs & Opportunities
This proactive approach, where they’d ask patients for a quick blood pressure check, led to significant success, with many patients returning for follow-up checks. Pennington added the patients were very appreciative and that the program helped show patients the clinical services the store offers.
“With the blood pressure program, it was really a good opportunity for us to show that we were more than just dispensing a pharmacy, and we recently implemented Test and Treat in our pharmacy as well,” says Pennington. “So those kind of things went hand in hand with showing our value outside of just dispensing.”
When contemplating new goals for 2025 EQUIPP Enhanced Services engagement, Samantha Pennington expresses strong enthusiasm and anticipation for upcoming opportunities.
She mentions actively checking for these opportunities since the beginning of the year and enjoys implementing them into their workflow and making them a priority.
Pennington says, “I’m excited to see what else will qualify for and are able to do (in EQUIPP). It’s really been fun to be a part of both the LAMP program and the blood pressure program as well.
Tap our expertise to improve patient and
business outcomes
With 10+ years of quality measurement expertise and deep pharmacy knowledge, PQS provides best-practices to develop innovative quality strategies to support more effective interventions.
10+ Years
of quality experience