
He is vice president of CCNC’s Pharmacy Programs. “This is a system for any willing provider who can do the service and is willing to be measured,” said Troy Trygstad, PharmD, PhD, CCNC’s chief pharmacist and administrator of this project. “This alliance will help show that close patient-pharmacist relationships, coordinated with the patient’s physician, are indeed valuable to our healthcare system and can help improve quality and lower costs.”ĬCNC will be working with a network of 150 pharmacies - independent community pharmacies, chain pharmacies, federally qualified health-center pharmacies, and hospital outpatient pharmacies. “Our research shows that pharmacists have frequent, face-to-face contact with patients, far more than even physicians do,” Dobson said. With the help of its partners, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Eshelman School of Pharmacy of the University of North Carolina (UNC), as well as a CMS Innovation grant, CCNC will test different ways the pharmacist can participate to help improve patient outcomes, quality of care, and cost. The purpose of this statewide initiative is to reconnect the clinical pharmacist with the primary care physician, so that the pharmacist can be an integral part of the multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals. CCNC serves approximately 1.3 million patients, including Medicaid beneficiaries, Medicaid/Medicare beneficiaries, privately insured employees, and the uninsured. To recapture that missing link and connect the pharmacist back to the medical community, Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) and its affiliates announced in October that they are embarking on an ambitious three-year project to develop and test a community pharmacy network working with its 1,800 primary care practices, which represent 95% of primary care delivery in the state. “The pharmacist has become just a dispenser, and is a huge missing component of the healthcare system,” Dobson said.
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Today’s healthcare delivery lacks that level of coordination, because the system isolates healthcare providers into professional silos. The next healthcare facility was 20 miles away.” “Even if I was seeing someone after hours, the pharmacist would be available and get the patient the medicine. “In our town of 1,200, my family practice and the local pharmacist were the healthcare system,” said Dobson, who is now president and CEO of Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), an organization devoted to the patient-centered medical care model.

If a patient showed up at the pharmacy with a medication problem or appeared to be ill, the community pharmacist would reach out to Dobson. Allen Dobson Jr., MD, the family practitioner, had a concern about a medication, he would pick up the phone and speak with the local pharmacist.

Collaborative care in a small town in North Carolina worked well years ago.
