Pharmacist's Leadership Skills Benefit Physicians through Collaboration

In this interview, Sarah Hurty, MD, owner of Take Back Your Practice, explains the important leadership skills that pharmacists possess, and how they can use these skills help physicians run their practice.

Transcript:

Sarah Hurty, MD: Pharmacists can be quite the hero, quite frankly, to independent physicians, and the two of them working together can achieve what most physicians cannot achieve all by themselves. First of all, yes through their collaboration of their mutual skills, you're going to have greater compliance and greater results, when you're using pharmaceuticals in particular, for the patients. The other thing is that pharmacists spend a lot of time in patient education, not just medications, but they actually engage in patient education in some ways more than physicians when it comes to anything that they're trying to get them to be compliant with protocols or treatments, or I'm thinking nutraceuticals in this particular case, as pharmacy moves in the direction of not only medication, but other understandings of what's happening actually in the body, and what you take into the body. So, our goal is to help physician practices to transform the way medicine is done in this country, by practicing wellness medicine inside the insurance model, and make up to a couple hundred thousand dollars more per provider. So for pharmacists, when they bring their skills to a physician, the physician does not necessarily want to have to manage, or even own, the business aspects of the practice, they want to be able to do the medicine. So, I think that pharmacists should be able to leverage not only their intellectual knowledge in pharmacy for the patient benefit, and for the doctor in collaborative practice, but also their business and management skills and leadership skills that very often physicians don't have. Their not nearly as organized and trained as pharmacists are, because pharmacists have had to or they would not survive, because they have a store, rather than a professional service.