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TUESDAY, June 26, 2018 (HealthDay News) — The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Pharmacists Association have created a guide that describes community-clinical linkages, which are connections among the community, clinics, and other settings where primary care is provided, according to an article published in Drug Topics<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Two collaborative models of care are detailed: medication therapy management, which is a patient-centered collaboration designed to enhance patients’ benefits from medication and achieve therapeutic goals, and collaborative drug therapy management, which is a more formal model in which pharmacists manage and monitor drug therapy to optimize patient outcomes and safety. Two barriers to collaborative care models are identified: One is that physicians and pharmacists traditionally worked separately from one another, resulting in difficulty even envisioning working together. The other is development of a working payment model.<\/p>\n
To help guide the collaboration model, seven steps have been developed with the pneumonic device LINKAGE. The steps are: learning about the community and clinical sectors; identifying and engaging key stakeholders; negotiating and agreeing upon goals and objectives; knowing which operational structure should be implemented; aiming to coordinate and manage the linkage; growing the linkage, bearing in mind sustainability; and evaluating the linkage.<\/p>\n
“Using these tools, both health care providers and patients could see more favorable health outcomes in the future,” according to the article.<\/p>\n
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