The Impact of Clinical Pharmacist Integration on a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Diabetes Management Team

The national initiative, Project IMProving America's Communities Together (IMPACT): Diabetes, was intended to scale a proven American Pharmacists Association (APhA) Foundation process model, which integrates pharmacists on the collaborative health-care team, in communities greatly affected by diabetes to improve key indicators of diabetes. This article discusses the results from 1 community in Mississippi.

This national prospective study followed patients with a hemoglobin A_1c (HbA_1c) >7% from September 2011 to January 2013. Pharmacists collaborated with providers and other health-care professionals to provide medication therapy management services for a minimum of 3 visits. Outcome measures included HbA_1c, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP and DBP), fasting cholesterol panel, body mass index (BMI), influenza vaccine and smoking status, and foot and eye examination dates.

At this site, there were statistically significant outcomes including mean HbA_1c decrease of 1.2% in SBP and DBP of 8.3 mm Hg and 3.5 mm Hg, respectively, and reduction in low-density lipoprotein of 16.6 mg/dL, all of which were greater improvements compared to overall results from combined sites.

Patients in this community who received care from the collaborative team, including a pharmacist, had improvement in most key indicators of diabetes, with a clinically significant reduction in HbA_1c.