Assessing Patient Adherence and Satisfaction: Clinical Services Beyond the Pharmacy Counter

Medication adherence is a bigger problem than many of us are willing to admit. If patients do not take their medications as prescribed, they will not get the full therapeutic benefits and will put themselves at risk if serious harm. An estimated 125,000 deaths occur in the United States annually due to non-adherence. The objective of this study is to establish a pharmacy intervention model that best provides patient satisfaction and improved medication adherence through the use of home visits and follow-up calls by pharmacists and pharmacy interns at Clark’s Pharmacy. In order to do this, patients receiving home visits from pharmacists or pharmacy interns will receive phone calls 90 days after every visit. These will be patients that have recently been discharged from skilled nursing facilities and other health care centers. In the calls, survey questions will be asked in order to measure their adherence and satisfaction with the pharmacy. Satisfaction will be measured in addition to adherence because studies show that there is a positive correlation between it and adherence. The questions will be formulated in consultation with a pharmacist who has used a similar survey over the phone before. We will need to use convenience sampling, since only patients of Clark’s Pharmacy already being visited at home will qualify to participate. This will be a cross-sectional study. Once data has been collected, SPSS will be used to run descriptive statistics, as well as a Chi-squared test. Data collection will take place from the spring of 2015 until the fall of 2016