Accreditation and Value-Based Care: Leveraging Operational Excellence and Clinical Services for Patients and Your Pharmacy

At the 2024 Total Pharmacy Solutions Summit Spring 2024, held April 13, Sandra C. Canally, RN, founder and CEO of the Compliance Team, hosted a session titled "Accreditation and Value-Based Care: Leveraging Operational Excellence and Clinical Services for Patients and Your Pharmacy." In the presentation, Canally discussed the goals, benefits, and opportunities of value-based care in pharmacy, as well as how to improve operations and clinical services.

“Now, what is value-based care,” Canally asked during the session. “[It] has many different definitions. But an easy one is it’s an evolving health care model moving pharmacy from transaction-based care to clinical-based services designed to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes. In other words, you’re prioritizing quality over quantity. It’s far more beneficial to the patient and, hopefully, cost-effective to the pharmacist.”

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a value-based care strategy can be summed up in 3 words: better, smarter, and healthier. Through the strategy, CMS focuses on using incentives to improve care, tying payment to value through new payment models, and changing how care is given through improved teamwork, better coordination across health care settings, more attention to population health, and putting health care information to work.

“Pharmacists who embrace value-based care will be well-positioned to meet the needs of their patients and the health care system in the future,” Canally said. “Value-based care models can lead to a number of positive outcomes, including…not only improving medication adherence, but reduced hospital readmissions, lower health care cost because [patients] are not going back for those readmissions, they’re not going [emergency room] because through your counseling you’re preventing them from needing to do that.”