Transition of care (TOC) communication is very much needed, according to community pharmacists who also shared their preferences in the content and method of communication in a recent study.
To determine preferences in TOC communications, this cross-sectional study gathered data by means of an electronic survey of community pharmacists. The North Carolina Board of Pharmacy distributed the survey. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the results.
A total of 343 community pharmacists responded to the electronic survey (response rate, 6.1 percent). Most of the respondents were working in an independent, single store (n=100; 29.2 percent) or national chain (n=100; 29.2 percent) pharmacy setting.
Via electronic health record was the most preferred method for a TOC communication (n=184; 63.0 percent). The commonly preferred contents of a TOC communication were as follows: active (n=274; 93.2 percent) and discontinued (n=254; 86.4 percent) medications and reason for hospitalization (n=250; 85.0 percent).
Lack of care coordination with community pharmacy (n=14; 35.0 percent), lack of support from other healthcare providers (n=9; 22.5 percent) and absence of compensation for providing the service (n=7; 17.5 percent) were the top three self-identified barriers to using a TOC communication.
In addition, most of the respondents (n=278; 97.5 percent) indicated that TOC communications would be useful if these were made available to them.
“Future research is warranted to implement TOC communications between a health system and community pharmacy,” the investigators said.