A taxonomy for community pharmacy patient care services reported in Pharmacist eCare Plans

Pharmacies belonging to the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Service Networks (CPESN) are transforming their practices with support of the Flip the Pharmacy initiative. These pharmacies are submitting eCare plans that describe care that they have provided to patients.

The objectives of this study were (1) To develop a taxonomy for services reported by community pharmacies participating in year 1 of the Flip the Pharmacy initiative and (2) to illustrate the use of the taxonomy for hypertension-related services.

A retrospective observational study design was used. The analyzed data were extracted from eCare plans submitted by participating pharmacies during the first year of the Flip the Pharmacy initiative (October 1, 2019-September 30, 2020). Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) codes submitted for encounter reason and for procedures were sorted into categories based on similarity of terminology in the SNOMED-CT code labels. All SNOMED-CT codes in the encounter reasons that had blood pressure or hypertension in their labels were mapped to taxonomy categories. Descriptive statistics were calculated for all variables.

A total of 368,297 eCare plans reporting 1,049,061 SNOMED-CT procedures were submitted for 133,210 patients by 526 pharmacies. Seven categories of community pharmacy patient care services were identified: medication synchronization, medication review, monitoring, immunizations, patient education, adherence, and recommendations. Over half of the encounter reasons (63.5%) and procedures (56.2%) were for medication synchronization. Both medication review and monitoring accounted for about 10% of the encounters, and medication review made up over 30% of procedures. A total of 18,307 encounters were related to hypertension. Of these, monitoring was the most frequent, with 11,285 encounters (61.6%) encounters, followed by patient education, with 5173 encounters (28.3%).

CPESN pharmacies are delivering a wide range of patient care services. This taxonomy provides a concise way to organize and report services being delivered by community pharmacies.