BACKGROUND The accountable care organization (ACO) model being adopted across the United States aims to improve patient care and reduce costs. Little is known about whether commercial ACO contracts include accountability for prescription drug spending or how ACOs are engaging outpatient pharmacies and managing prescription drug use. OBJECTIVE To explore how ACOs are addressing drug spending a...

We performed an investigation on the patients' demand for community pharmacy based on the analysis of questionnaire responses on community pharmacy services from the patients at 32 pharmacies in Tokyo and Osaka. In the previous study, we developed seven evaluation indices for pharmacy services, and showed that the functions most sought by patients in the "ideal pharmacies" were "Attitude of pha...

OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy of a new quality control strategy based on daily randomised sampling and monitoring a Sentinel Surveillance System (SSS) medication cart, in order to identify medication errors and their origin at different levels of the process. METHOD Prospective quality control study with one year follow-up. A SSS medication cart was randomly selected once a week and double...

BACKGROUND Providing clinical pharmacy services to patients in their homes after discharge from hospital has been reported to reduce health care costs and improve outcomes. The Medication Management Program of the Fraser Health Authority involves pharmacists making home visits to provide clinical pharmacy services to elderly patients who have recently been discharged from hospital and others co...

This paper builds Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Stackelberg, Pharmacy Stackelberg and Nash game models with without price cap regulation. The optimal pricing, performance social welfare are derived compared in three different power structures to find out how regulation affect the drug supply chain. More over other chain members always allows pharmaceutical manufacturer obtain more profits. Howeve...

BACKGROUND Despite evidence of benefit for pharmacist involvement in chronic disease management, the provision of these services in community pharmacy has been suboptimal. The Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (PARiHS) framework suggests that for knowledge translation to be effective, there must be evidence of benefit, a context conducive to implementation, and faci...

PURPOSE Pharmacy compounding of prescription therapies that do not have Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval increases administrative costs to managed care organizations and may also place members at risk for poor outcomes. This paper provides health care administrators with information and tools that can be used to manage risk-encouraged practices from pharmacy compounders, and suggests...

Blood pressure (BP) telemonitoring systems and pharmacist management programs were introduced into Haruka Community Pharmacy. A 22-year-old healthy male came to the community pharmacy, although he was not in a diseased state, he had been informed previously that he had a moderately high BP during a routine examination. He continued home BP telemonitoring for 28 days. A pharmacist intervention w...

OBJECTIVE Pharmacists can play an important role as leaders to reduce patient safety risks, optimize the safe function of medication management systems, and align pharmacy services with national initiatives that measure and reward quality performance. The objective of this article is to determine the actions that pharmacists can take to create a visible and sustainable safe medication managemen...