Home Health & Hospice Week
Study: Med Management Helps Some Patients Avoid Hospital
Your lowest risk patients may benefit from medication management to reduce rehospitalizations, but it probably isn’t going to help high-risk patients much. At least, that’s what one new study has found.
A recent study in Health Services Research, assessed the efficacy of pharmacist-led telephone medication therapy management (MTM) at reducing hospitalizations in Medicare patients entering home care. The experiment used an initial phone call by a pharmacy technician to verify active medications; a pharmacist-provided medication regimen review by telephone; and follow-up pharmacist phone calls at day seven and as needed for 30 days.
Results: “There was no significant difference in the 60-day probability of hospitalization between the MTM intervention and control groups,” acknowledge the study authors in the abstract. But “for patients within the lowest baseline risk quartile … the intervention group was three times more likely to remain out of the hospital at 60 days … compared to the usual care group.”
Bottom line: “This MTM intervention may not be effective for all home health patients,” say the authors led by pharmacist Alan J. Zillich at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy. “How-ever, for those patients with the lowest-risk profile, the MTM intervention prevented patients from being hospitalized at 60 days.
See the abstract at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-6773.12176/abstract.
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