As a Healthcare Professional (HCP) you strive for the best treatment outcomes for your patients. The success of any treatment plan is not in your hands alone. The right medications are a good start, but the patient must be willing and able to take the medications you prescribe in the way you have prescribed them and for as long as you have indicated they will be taken. Here is where many treatment plans can fail.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), medication adherence (or compliance) can seriously impair the effectiveness of a treatment plan. Noncompliance can account for up to 50% of treatment failures, and 25% of hospitalizations in the United States each year.
The reasons patients give for not taking medicines are varied, including patients not tolerating the form in which the medication is available, having to take too many separate medications, and just forgetting your instructions as soon as they walk out your door. All of these factors and more are addressed when using a compounding pharmacy.
What is a compounding pharmacy?
Simply put, a compounding pharmacy has elevated the long available practice of putting compatible medications together in a form, dosage, and combination specifically suited to the patient for which the prescription is intended. The formal definition for compounding is, “the preparation, mixing, assembling, altering, packaging, and labeling of a drug, drug-delivery device, or device in accordance with a licensed practitioner’s prescription, medication order, or initiative based on the practitioner/patient/ pharmacist/compounder relationship in the course of professional practice.” (U.S. Pharmacopeia Convention (USP) ). Through this specialty practice, the prescriber has an arsenal of medications that might not be otherwise available.
How does a compounding pharmacy help improve treatment success?
As a partner in a treatment plan, a compounding pharmacy can have a significant impact on its success. With the help of the prescriber, a compounding pharmacy develops personalized medicines that address a number of the causes of non-compliance. Personalized medications have the greatest chance of a positive impact:
- By creating combinations not commercially available
- By creating unique combinations for hard-to-treat illnesses
- By providing medications in forms (e.g. liquid, chewable) more acceptable to patients
- By removing non-essential ingredients (e.g. gluten, dyes) that patients cannot tolerate
Learn more about what is a compounding pharmacy?
Why consider partnering with a compounding pharmacist instead of using a retail pharmacy?
A compounding pharmacy specializes in innovative treatments for hard-to-treat conditions. They will work alongside the prescriber to provide the best medication solution for the patient. An excellent compounding pharmacy will also work directly with the patient to consult on and support the medication plan. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggest as many as 80% of patients do not remember the medication instructions they were given by their doctor. Health Dimensions Clinical Pharmacy, for example, has developed robust patient-focused services that remove barriers to prescription care including continuing education, follow-up support with patients to make sure they are taking the medication correctly and making sure medications are refilled on time.
Successful partnerships lead to successful patient outcomes
Through special combinations and forms, compounding pharmacists partner with prescribers to provide the best medication solution for individual patients. A compounding pharmacist has the opportunity to personalize the patient’s medication. Personalization means doctors and patients are not tied to the dosages, forms and combinations pharmaceutical companies have determined are the most commercially viable. At the same time, patients have an answer to the issues that keep them from following a carefully constructed prescription care plan.
Health Dimensions Clinical Pharmacy has been providing pharmaceutical solutions to doctors and their patients since 2006. Locally owned and based in southern Michigan, Health Dimensions Clinical Pharmacy was among the nation’s first compounding pharmacies to earn accreditation by the Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board (PCAB) of the Accreditation for Healthcare Commission.
Our mission is to partner with patients and physicians to provide service excellence, accuracy, and rapid response to patient personalized prescription needs.
To learn more about building a partnership, call Health Dimensions Clinical Pharmacy at (800) 836-2303.
