Prescriber Education

UMass Medical School’s Clinical Pharmacy Services provides prescribers with unbiased, up-to-date information on evidence-based clinical pharmacy practices. Through our PrescriberEdu™ service, we offer customized prescriber education, also known as academic detailing.

PrescriberEdu™ supplies health care providers with resources that enable them to better comply with the preferred drug lists and formularies used by our clients, which include health care organizations and managed care networks. Increased compliance is necessary to achieve improvements in patient outcomes and reductions in unnecessary costs. Existing clinical evidence shows the economic and health benefits associated with prescribing preferred drugs and using step therapy.

Our trained clinical pharmacists act as liaisons between our clients and their prescribers. A flexible program, PrescriberEdu™ can be adapted to suit the specific needs of our clients. We focus on quality improvement through the dissemination of evidence-based prescribing guidelines.

Customized approach

Clinical Pharmacy Services approaches prescriber education in one of two ways, depending on our clients’ preferences.

We provide services that either target a general disease state or support a specific medical initiative. This includes general information, as well as side effects and the importance of proper administration of the drugs for patients with chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma. We use email, phone calls, and face-to-face visits to collaborate with providers in managing the complex care of these patients. PrescriberEdu™ also provides website services to enhance communication with physicians, maximize training opportunities, and serve as a portal for educational information.

A comprehensive review of our clients’ data enables our clinical pharmacy team to identify areas that can be enhanced with our PrescriberEdu™ services. We also collect data to provide outcomes analysis for our clients’ specific programs.

We recently targeted bronchiolitis with a PrescriberEdu™ program designed for one of the largest departments of health in the country. We are now designing modules on hypertension and behavioral health for the same client. Another program, at UMass Memorial Health Care, has saved $123,500 in three months by having our pharmacists talk with physicians about their prescribing habits.

Multi-tiered interventions

Using the expertise of our PrescriberEdu™ team, we strive to influence provider prescribing patterns in order to reduce overall health expenditures and improve patient outcomes. Our pharmacists perform the following for our clients:

• Evaluate the clinical and economic benefits of prescriber formulary adherence
• Review provider prescribing habits
• Compare peer prescribing habits
• Improve prescriber adherence to the formulary
• Ensure that patients receive medication therapy for optimal clinical outcomes
• Provide patients with the most cost-effective medication therapy
• Communicate directly with prescribers through email, phone calls, interactive websites, and face-to-face visits

The multi-tiered interventions that Clinical Pharmacy Services uses are based on prescribing volume and other client-identified factors.

• Evaluation of client-specific medical and pharmacy claims data
• Development of prescriber education materials
• Creation of patient education materials
• Training of clinicians to conduct face-to-face prescriber visits
• Development and monitoring of an evaluation plan for clinical and economic outcomes