The management of adherence outlier population in a pharmacy-based patient care model during COVID years

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Since early 2020 systems have been dealing with the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, social isolation, and restricted movement of people on access to medications and management services, this poster will describe and assess the capture of adherence outliers into UI TEAM RX an outpatient pharmacy-based patient care delivery model. OBJECTIVE(S) To assess the capture of EQuIPP adherence outlier patients into a pharmacy-based patient care model (UI TEAM RX), days to medication pick up, and improvement in adherence in an outpatient pharmacy during COVID calendar years (CY) 2020 and 2021. METHOD(S) A monthly list of patients who have not met the adherence benchmark is obtained from EQuIPP. These patients are captured within the UI TEAM RX patient care model. Capture rate was defined as the ratio of the total number of patients captured in UI TEAM RX over the total number of potential captures. The total number of potential captures represents the total number of adherence outliers attributed to the pharmacy minus the patients that are captured by other pharmacy-managed services. The average number of days to pick up the medications was quantified as the days gap between medication ready status to pick up by the patient. Improvement in adherence was defined based on whether the patient remained an outlier at the end of the year. RESULT(S) For the outpatient care center pharmacy, 146 and 119 unique EQuIPP adherence outlier patients were identified for CY2020 and 2021, respectively. During the peak of the COVID pandemic in 2020, the capture rate for the model was only 43%. In 2021, the patient capture rate for the model rose to 100%. The average days to pick up were 2.9 and 2.6 for CY 2020 and 2021, respectively. At the end of 2020, five UI TEAM RX patients were no longer outliers vs one patient at the end of CY 2021. The number of Non-UI TEAM RX patients (patients not captured in the model) that remained outliers for CY 2020 and CY 2021 are one and ten. CONCLUSION(S) A lower capture rate was observed during CY 2020, which may be attributed to the start of the pandemic. There was a significant improvement in the capture rate in 2021. The average days to medication pick-up were shorter in 2021 vs 2020. A fewer number of patients remained as outliers at the end of 2021 vs 2020 as well. Engaging patients in the UI TEAM RX model appears to impact achieving adherence benchmarks positively;however, this needs to be further researched appropriately.