Implementation of a community pharmacy workflow process to identify and follow up with prescription abandonment

To describe a workflow process that uses members of the pharmacy staff to identify prescription abandonment and resolve barriers that contribute to medication nonadherence.

Independent community pharmacy in the southeastern United States.

Each of the 6 Moose Pharmacy locations provides enhanced pharmacy services, including adherence packaging, medication synchronization programs, immunizations, home visits, home delivery, comprehensive medication reviews, disease state management programs, point-of-care testing, and compounding.

A workflow process, including a conversation flowchart and will-call bag tag, were created to support prescription abandonment discussions. Patients were included if at least 1 refilled or newly authorized prescription was not picked up within 7 days of the medication being filled. Patients younger than 18 years and as-needed prescriptions were excluded.

During the 60-day study period, 73 patients met the criteria of having an abandoned prescription; 124 total prescriptions were identified as abandoned. The barriers to adherence identified with these patients were 32% forgotten, 18% cost, 11% transportation, 4% refusal, 16% other responses, and 19% of patients who were not able to be reached. After the process was completed, 56 patients (76.7%) received their medications. The average time to pick-up for subsequent successful contact was 3 days. Of the 73 patients, 15 (20.5%) were already enrolled in the medication synchronization program. With the use of a conversation flowchart, 2 additional patients were enrolled in the pharmacy's medication adherence program and 8 others were enrolled in the automatic notification program when prescriptions are filled.

A workflow process such as the one used in this study can help to identify barriers contributing to prescription abandonment. Through this process, the pharmacy learned that educating all staff members regarding the workflow may help to expand interventions to curtail prescription abandonment and address medication adherence.