Benefits of Implementing Pharmacist Services

Jaron Stout, PharmD, owner, consulting pharmacist, Collaborative Pharmacy Consultants, discusses the benefits of pharmacist services and a personal success story. This video was filmed at the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists' 2019 Forum in Washington, DC.

Jaron Stout, PharmD: Anytime you’re including a specialist to a team, it adds value, and in the world we live, we have an aging population, we have people taking more and more meds, we have people with more and more chronic diseases. So, polypharmacy is a huge issue with this.

So, my biggest success story with this. I had someone who was sent to me — well, someone was hospitalized for new-onset seizures, had chronic pain, Parkinson disease. They then went to the hospital, and then they came to one of my facilities. Fortunately, it was one of my facilities that was implementing – it was very new in the process of incident 2 physician visits.

I was able to sit down with her and her family and narrow down that her new-onset seizures were caused by the meds that she was taking. I was able to fix the problem, and she didn’t have to take more meds to prevent the seizures and possibly create more side-effects and more meds down the road. And so, by fixing that problem — that’s the benefit of having a pharmacist. We’re able to look at – so, physicians are going to start from the patient and diagnosis and work down, whereas the pharmacist will work from the meds and work up to the conditions and see possibly what’s contributing.

Physicians are capable of doing that, but not on the same level, and that’s not something that’s their primary objective. So, it creates a new perspective of the same problem. So, they start there, we start here and we’re able to cover all aspects of that problem, of that patient.