Dr Calvin Knowlton Outlines Benefits Seen From Enhanced Medication Therapy Management

Calvin Knowlton, BScPharm, MDiv, PhD, chief executive officer and founder of Tabula Rasa HealthCare, discusses who benefits most from the Enhanced Medication Therapy Management Model, how advances in technology have enhanced these services, and what best practices have been identified.

Transcript

Last year CMMI introduced the Enhanced Medication Therapy Management Model. Who can benefit most from this model?

Enhanced Medication Therapy Management really targets people that are at high risk for adverse drug events, and who could that be? It’s mostly elderly people. The government has a study out from the CDC that shows that 50% of the elderly are taking 5 or more medications a day, and they have about a 50% chance of an adverse drug event once a year. When you get up to 10 medications a day, it’s about an 82% chance of an adverse drug event once a year. So, that’s the people we target. The folks that are taking multiple medications, they’re at high risk for an adverse drug event. They benefit the most.

How have advances in technology impacted eMTM services?

Part of the reason we can do this now is because of the advancement of technology, the speed of which in half a second we can take 10 or 15 drugs and instantaneously give the user information. We can work in the cloud, so it can be used internationally, which it is. So, the technology is really what has supported this.

Plus, because of technology, we’re able to go back to the basics of science that we learned in pharmacy school but were not able to apply at the bench because it was just too complicated and too difficult. But, now with the technology, we can do instantaneous things we couldn’t do even 5 years ago.

What best practices have you identified in using eMTM to improve population health and patient outcomes?

One of the best practices is that we’ve taken all this information that I explained, the multicomponents of the simultaneous drug interaction system, and boil it into a risk score from 0-50, 50 being terrible and 0 being wonderful. So, we can see right away a patient’s risk score, and we say just like you know what your FICO credit score is for credit risk, well maybe in a few years we’ll know what our medication risk score is for our mother’s medications.

So, it’s a score that can be carried and be compared from 1 person to another, and also the good news is it’s a score that can be lowered. There’s things you can do to change the regimen or change the time of day when they take the medicine, So, if this one gets into those parking spaces first, we’ll take this one first and we’ll take this one at supper, for example, when it’s clear, instead of taking them all at once. So, the risk score has been very helpful in comparison and in encouraging people that if we make some changes in the regimen, then you’re going to have less risk for an adverse drug event.