Addressing Determinants of Health Together: Pharmacists and Patients Co-Designing PCOR Priorities

Background: As the most accessible and local healthcare providers, community pharmacists are uniquely positioned to play a major role in addressing social determinants of health (SDOH). To increase patient access to healthcare resources and improve SDOH, community pharmacies have begun to implement initiatives to address unmet social needs, such as screening for SDOH to help patients avoid barriers to health care. Although results from existing initiatives are encouraging, additional work is needed to ensure current and future initiatives adequately address patient needs.

Proposed Solution to the Problem: The Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) and the Patient Advocate Foundation (PAF) will convene a diverse group of patients and pharmacy stakeholders for the “Addressing SDOH Together” workshop, to identify and prioritize PCOR topics and evidence needed to improve SDOH screening and interventions in the pharmacy setting. Bringing together this diverse group of stakeholders will ensure that patient needs are incorporated into PCOR to improve health outcomes. The convening event will take place in Baltimore, Maryland at the Hilton Hotel.

Objective: Facilitate a robust planning and networking event for patients and pharmacy stakeholders to co-develop a set of PCOR priorities and project ideas focused on how to best identify and address patients’ social needs in the community pharmacy setting.

Activities: A planning committee of six patient and three pharmacy stakeholders will be recruited to plan the convening event. A pre-workshop webinar will take place approximately one week prior to the in-person workshop and will consist of relationship building, gap analysis review, and group discussion. The event will result in a patient- and stakeholder-generated list of PCOR-focused topics to advance community pharmacies’ role in identifying and addressing patients’ social needs. The “Addressing SDOH Together” workshop will be an in-person half-day workshop that will consist of three activities: a patient panel, small group discussions, and research prioritization. The post-workshop webinar will occur approximately two weeks after the in-person meeting, where participants will reflect on their experience at the workshop and participate in an evaluation activity that will consist of qualitative feedback and polling.

Projected Outcomes and Outputs: Short-term outcomes will be patient-pharmacy co-created research priorities and identified potential future PCOR/CER projects focused on SDOH; medium-term outcomes include dissemination of project findings and increased focus on PCOR/CER topics in research on addressing SDOH in the pharmacy setting; and long-term outcomes will be relationships between patients and pharmacists and pharmacists addressing SDOH. The intended outputs of this project are meeting materials, a list of future PCOR-focused research topics, a summary report, dissemination and sustainability plan, and an evaluation and reporting tool.

Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: A geographically, racially, and economically diverse group of patients will be recruited from PAF’s Patient and Caregiver Network. Pharmacy stakeholders will be recruited from PQA’s membership, representing large, national pharmacy chains, small- to mid-size regional chains, and independent pharmacies. All planning committee members, panelists, and attendees will be compensated for their participation.

Project Collaborators: PQA will partner with the PAF to co-host this multi-stakeholder convening. PQA and PAF have experience working directly with patients and pharmacists.