Pharmacist Role in HF Patients Transition of Care

"Transition of care" is one of the new disciplines that pharmacists have been involved-in within the healthcare system. It is a process where a patient's care is shifting from one setting to another. During this process, transitional care is designed to ensure continuity of patient care across different sites or across different levels of care within the same facility. For example, from Intensive Care Unit (ICU) to the ward, from hospital to home, or from hospital to rehab centers. Many stakeholders are involved in this process, and coordination between them is necessary to have successful one, in addition to logistical arrangements, and patient education. Otherwise, poor communication, inadequate patient education, and lack of access to healthcare services, will produce failure of having a smooth transition and could result in negative health outcomes including complications in the patient's disease status, emergency room visits or hospital readmissions. Not only that these negative health outcomes are affecting the patient, they are also negatively affecting the healthcare spending in the United States. For instance, inadequate care coordination and management of care transitions accounted for $25 to $45 billion in wasteful spending in 2011 through preventable adverse events and hospital readmissions. Therefore, cost containment and reducing the excessive spending in healthcare is an important aim of "transition of care", secondary to improving patient outcomes. Pharmacist's role in Transition of care: Pharmacists have the knowledge, training and expertise to play a major role in the transition of care process. They are involved in dispensing the patient's medications at the hospital, ensuring that the patient's medication chart is updated, identify any medication discrepancy, provide medication reconciliation, medication education, patient counseling at discharge and they could follow-up with the patients after discharge to check if they filled their prescription, what side effects are they having, and monitor their adherence to their treatment plan. These pharmacist's interventions have been applied, among other approaches, by hospitals to improve the quality of their services and minimize the rate of readmissions.