The Unsung Role of the Pharmacist in Patient Health

Are people relying too much on the traditional doctor/patient interaction?

“Older adults are taking an awful lot of pills these days," says a professor of
medicine and pharmacy. Getting them to stop taking unnecessary ones is harder than
one might think.
Credit
Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

We know many people end up with a risky pileup of prescribed medications. Many
efforts have been made, with varied success, to correct this problem. Yet we’ve
usually focused on physician behavior, when there’s another powerful lever:
pharmacists.

About 30 percent of older adults in the United States and Canada filled a
prescription in the last few years for one of many medications that the American
Geriatrics Society recommends they avoid. Such drugs can lead to more harm —
like cognitive impairment or falls — than good, and often safer options are
available.

“Older adults are taking an awful lot of pills these days — 66 percent take five drugs
or more per day, and 27 percent take 10 or more per day — so if some of those pills
are no longer necessary and may even be causing harm, why not ask if it is time to
deprescribe?” said Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, a professor of medicine and pharmacy at
the University of Montreal, and director of the Canadian Deprescribing Network.

It’s not easy to get patients off such drugs, though. Physicians often don’t have
enough information about what patients are taking, or may lack the time to talk to
patients about these medications. They fear that stopping the drugs might cause
harm or make patients upset.
To explore the possible role of pharmacists, Dr. Tannenbaum conducted a large
randomized controlled trial over four years in community pharmacies in Quebec.
The results of the study were recently published in JAMA.

Patients 65 years or older were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the
intervention group, pharmacists gave both patients and their physicians educational
materials on the specific drug that might have been inappropriately prescribed. Such
brochures could be delivered by mail or in person. The control group got the usual
care, with no educational materials.

Drugs that were targets for deprescribing included sedatives, first-generation

antihistamines, glyburide (used to treat diabetes), and certain nonsteroidal anti-
inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen or naproxen. The main outcome of interest was
the ending of a prescription for one of the four medication classes six months later.

Almost 500 patients, average age 75, participated in the trial, and about 90 percent
of them completed it. The intervention made a difference. Within six months, 43
percent of the patients in the intervention group had stopped taking one of the
selected medicines. The corresponding figure was 12 percent in the control group.

In medicine, we often focus on the traditional doctor/patient interaction. We tend to

ignore practitioners who come into contact with patients more than physicians, who
in this case could hand over brochures personally. In the study, pharmacists were
also paid to send information to the patients’ doctors ($19 Canadian, equivalent to
$14 American, per physician outreach).

Similar studies trying to enlist pharmacists are rare, but not unknown. In a 1996
study in the American Journal of Medicine that randomly assigned 208 patients, half
of them had a pharmacist in a Veterans Affairs Medical Center review their
medications and make recommendations to their physician. This resulted in
improvements in prescriptions in 24 percent of patients versus 6 percent in usual
care.

A 1998 study published in JAMA encouraged pharmacists to contact physicians by

alerts when they were employing drugs that were not ideal in the care of older
people. They were able to reach physicians just over half the time and saw changes
in prescriptions about a quarter of the time. This was not a controlled trial, however.

A 2014 study in JAMA Internal Medicine focused on direct-to-consumer

educational materials from pharmacists to reduce inappropriate benzodiazepine
prescriptions for older people. It worked 27 percent of the time compared with 5
percent in usual care. A 2001 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal
focused on messages sent to physicians only, and found no significant changes.

Dr. Tannenbaum, author of the recent JAMA study, thought that communication
was essential to her project’s results: “We first asked primary care providers what
information they needed to safely deprescribe patients’ medications,” she said.
“Based on the physicians’ answers, we provided pharmacists with a template on
how best to communicate the evidence about deprescribing to physicians. When
pharmacists equipped patients with the same information, applied specifically to
medications the patient had been taking for a while, everyone was on board and
keen to initiate a conversation.”

Of course, this study took place in Canada, and pharmacists’ scope of practice may
differ in parts of the United States. The pharmacists were also reimbursed for
physician contact, which might not occur in the United States. Pharmacists have
seen increases in their scope, especially with respect to contraception in Oregon and
California, which tend to be supported by patients as well.

Much like another recent study involving barbershops (and pharmacists), this study
provides evidence that seemingly intractable problems can be overcome by
expanding the focus of our interventions. There are many more professionals
involved in health care besides physicians. They can help make health care better.