Identification of the optimal primary care clinical pharmacy comprehensive medication management practice in the veterans health administration

Clinical pharmacists are well‐positioned as the medication experts on the health care team to work collaboratively with providers and patients to achieve optimal medication use in order to maximize patient benefit and outcome. Comprehensive medication management (CMM) is defined as a patient‐centered approach to optimizing medication use and improving patient health outcomes that is delivered by a clinical pharmacist working in collaboration with the patient and other health care providers. Lack of fidelity in practice model design and implementation make generalization of results of clinical pharmacy CMM practice difficult. There is currently no organization that evaluates standardized implementation of clinical pharmacists providing CMM in a Patient‐Centered Medical Home (PCMH) leading to wide variability of CMM implementation within the PCMH model. The Veterans Health Administration (VA) is the largest integrated health care system in the United States. Clinical pharmacy specialists (CPS) in the VA work autonomously but collaboratively under a practice area‐based scope of practice with prescriptive authority. The goal of the Clinical Pharmacy Practice Office Platinum Practice Designation was to develop a standardized review process to recognize sites that have achieved core elements of desired primary care pharmacy practice. In this paper, we describe the creation and implementation of this process. The submission process consisted of three rounds ranging from survey, data submission, data review and validation, and a facility interview. A total of 19 submissions were completed with two sites identified as achieving greater than 90% fidelity to the CMM model and were considered best practices. The creation of a rigorous set of implementation tools and measurement metrics creates the necessary fidelity to evaluate programs across different geographic areas. Identified sites provide examples for other facilities to emulate and creates momentum for pharmacy practice advancement throughout the nation.