Strengths
- Incorporating a pharmacist at the clinic can greatly reduce the workload of the physician and improve the clinic’s time to next available appointment metric.
- Patients are having trouble with medication storage and adherence. A pharmacist is best equipped to help with these issues.
- Pharmacists can assess the need for, and administer vaccines. This will alleviate some of that burden from the physicians and nurses.
- By having a pharmacist at the clinic, we can utilize the shared visit appointment model to maximize revenue. Medicare and Medicaid both pay for these services.
- The physical resources such as computers, office space, and chairs, are already at the clinic, reducing start up costs to a near zero amount.
Weaknesses
- Patients have issues actually getting their medications because there is not an in-house pharmacy.
- Currently the clinic is only being ran by a resident. We do not have a BCACP certified pharmacist on staff.
- Staffing the clinic 2 days per week limits the amount of time a pharmacist can work with patients. This reduces flexibility of scheduling.
- This clinic is located far away from the closest Eskenazi Health Pharmacy.
Opportunities
- Patients reside close to the clinic allowing them easy access and fewer cancellations.
- A lot of patients have psychiatric needs. We could incorporate this into the pharmacy services.
- The patients suffer from low health literacy therefore we could use the pharmacist to help patients understand their disease state and learn how to manage it.
- This is the first ambulatory care clinic serving the homeless in Indiana!
Threats
- Serving the homeless could lead to difficulties financially.
- The pharmacist cannot bill for their services unless the visit is shared with a provider.
- Patients may not have transportation to a pharmacy to pick up medications.
- We are relying on patients to show up for their appointment so we can help them, but also so we can receive payment for our shared visit appointments.
Citation:
TA Walroth, oral communication, October 28, 2019.