Capturing Value: How Health-System Specialty Pharmacies Define and Document Pharmacist Interventions

Standardized pharmacist intervention practices and documentation among health-system specialty pharmacies could improve understanding of the pharmacists' role and value in this setting. This study describes current health-system specialty pharmacies' intervention practices. A survey developed by a volunteer committee subgroup was distributed to two health-system specialty pharmacy group email distribution lists. The survey evaluated the types of tasks considered to be clinical or non-clinical interventions; who could perform interventions; where and how they were documented; data elements included in documentation; and how intervention data were classified, used, reviewed, and shared with internal or external stakeholders. Twenty-four institutions responded to the survey. Tasks within medication management, adverse drug events/monitoring, and education domains were more commonly considered clinical interventions; tasks in the health maintenance and coordination of care domains were more frequently considered non-clinical interventions or not considered to be interventions. Interventions were completed by pharmacists (at 100% of sites) and were mostly documented in the electronic health record (92%). Intervention data were primarily collected to meet accreditation purposes (96%) or for quality auditing and review (88%). No respondents shared intervention data with patients. Results demonstrate areas of alignment and variance in intervention definition and documentation among health-system specialty pharmacies.