Evaluation of a Consumer-Generated Marketing Plan for Medication Therapy Management Services

Abstract

We greatly appreciate the assistance of Marj Schneider and her colleagues at Tybee Types during the focus group transcription process.The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Serguei Pakhomov for expert consultation during natural language processing analysis. Declarations and Disclosures:The authors declare no conflicts of interest or financial interests that the authors or members of their immediate families have in any product or service discussed in the manuscript, including grants (pending or received), employment, gifts, stock holdings or options, honoraria, consultancies, expert testimony, patents and royalties.Institutional review board (IRB) approval was obtained through the University of Minnesota Research Subjects Protection Program and assigned the code number 1009E90532.Confidentiality Agreements were used in this project to protect the proprietary rights of each project site and the marketing company. Abstract The purpose of this project was to utilize a consumer-directed, care model redesign methodology to develop and evaluate a marketing plan for medication therapy management services (MTMS) provided in community pharmacies. This was accomplished through a six-step process: (1) application of "design thinking" for eliciting consumer input on redesigning MTMS and marketing approaches, (2) exploratory research, (3) focus group analysis, (4) marketing plan development, (5) marketing plan implementation, and (6) marketing plan evaluation. The findings showed that the application of "design thinking" and focus group analysis was useful for creating a consumer-directed marketing plan for medication therapy management services (MTMS). Implementation and evaluation of the MTMS Marketing Plan revealed that the most successful pharmacies were those that had established business associate agreements with the medical clinics closest to their site of practice, including access to electronic health records. This "virtual electronic presence" of pharmacists in the medical care system was highly consistent with the consumer demand we uncovered for a visible relationship between pharmacists, physicians and other health care providers. IntroductionMedication Therapy Management Services (MTMS) have been designed to optimize therapeutic outcomes for people taking medications. There is evidence for improvement in clinical, economic, and humanistic outcomes through this service [1][2][3][4][5]. However, a number of barriers to the delivery of MTMS have been documented during its implementation including: pharmacist training, staffing, management, documentation, access to medical records, consumer awareness, marketing, provider recognition, and payment for services [6][7][8].As barriers to building practices supporting the delivery of this service are being addressed [9][10][11][12][13], the practice management challenge of marketing MTMS to consumers remains. For example, individuals who receive MTMS overwhelmingly report: (1) a favorable evaluation of pharmacist-provided MTMS, (2) that they would use this service again...

Impact of passive and active promotional strategies on patient acceptance of medication therapy management services

“…6 Before data collection, pharmacists at participating locations were trained on MTM delivery and use of the promotional approach assigned to their site. Pharmacists providing verbal promotional messages (telephone calls or face-to-face) received a brief script to follow with the patient and a list of follow-up points and questions for use if the patient was not immediately interested.…”

“…These studies have described the importance of clearly explaining the purpose of MTM, exhibiting a team-based approach to care, explaining why the pharmacist is the optimal health care provider to provide MTM, focusing on those services patients perceive as most beneficial (such as the personal medication list), using patient-friendly language (i.e., "medication check-up" and "medication management"), and increasing overall exposure to MTM. [5][6][7] Although these studies have identified patient preferences for marketing techniques, no studies to date have been conducted to implement these strategies in a prospective, randomized way.…”

“…5,6 Previous studies have identified the need to enhance marketing efforts by taking into account patients' perceptions and expectations. These studies have described the importance of clearly explaining the purpose of MTM, exhibiting a team-based approach to care, explaining why the pharmacist is the optimal health care provider to provide MTM, focusing on those services patients perceive as most beneficial (such as the personal medication list), using patient-friendly language (i.e., "medication check-up" and "medication management"), and increasing overall exposure to MTM.…”

Perspectives on the pharmacist’s “product”: a narrative review

“…Studies show that patients and pharmacists have different perceptions of the pharmacist's role in healthcare, with patients primarily seeing pharmacists as dispensers of medicine. [11][12][13][14][15][16] This is to be expected since community pharmacists, the most publicly visible, operate under a retail business model, in which production processes revolve around the sale of merchandise. 17 In the retail business model, success or failure of community pharmacies depends on the sale of tangible goods such as nonprescription drugs, prescription medicines, medical devices, durable medical equipment, and adherence packaging.…”

Using Service Blueprints to Visualize Pharmacy Innovations

“…Applying the principles of service design can help pharmacists manage both the quality and patient perceptions of the service provided [7,8]. Service design is the process of planning and organizing the customer service experience using a number of methods and tools derived from disciplines as diverse as ethnography, systems engineering, management science, and informatics.…”