CPF FUNDED GRANT DETAILS

One of pharmacys most pressing problems is to ensure that pharmacists have the necessary patient care skills to provide new Medicare Part D Medication Therapy Management Services MTMS. Pharmacists who may not already have such skills will require a quick and efficient way to augment their patient care skills. Previously, we developed a patient interview tool that used a structured interview and data analysis format to help a pharmacist to simultaneously take a patients history, identify the patients drug therapy problems and develop a care plan. If this tool is found to be clinically valid, it will be useful for pharmacists seeking to rapidly enhance their patient care skills for MTMS. Our objective is to evaluate the clinical validity of that tool and our research hypothesis is that the drug therapy problems uncovered by a beginner patient care pharmacist using the tool will be similar to the problems identified by an expert pharmacist without the tool. We will enroll 70 patients number needed for adequate statistical power who will be interviewed by final semester 6th year pharmacy students on clerkship using the tool a surrogate for beginner patient care pharmacists and again by expert faculty without the tool. If the results in both groups are similar, we will have demonstrated that the tool will be useful for beginner patient care pharmacists who hope to implement MTMS quickly and competently.