The A3 Collaborative offered a solid foundation for learning how to implement processes with quality improvement metrics to measure and communicate outcomes. With an emphasis on integrating Comprehensive Medication Management (CMM) services into care delivery, it guided us on principles to incorporate into our practice as well as the means to elevate the pharmacist’s role within the health care team.
The fourteen participating health care organizations in this recent A3 Collaborative are a representation of how the pharmacy community across the country stood up and responded to the COVID pandemic. Instead of shrinking back from responsibilities when the crisis hit, pharmacy, represented in health systems, communities, federally qualified health centers, critical access hospitals, and professional organizations, showed up with increase force and asked: what gaps can we fill?
AIMM recognizes that Comprehensive Medication Management (CMM) is a unique and powerful service. What distinguishes it and makes it powerful is the fact that it is designed to produce results rather than generate activity.
The A3 Collaborative initially launched in the Spring of 2017 and has supported more than 100 health systems and organizations implement CMM operations, scale and spread services, and for some, successfully install financial arrangements to ensure sustainability. Going forward, AIMM and partners will work to redesign the collaborative to address the technical and policy challenges of achieving full scale CMM, particularly in light of the evolving healthcare transformation due to COVID-19.
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented acceleration of new (and waiting) innovations in patient care delivery. It’s important for health care organizations to learn from the rapid transformations they are making and how it can be applied and sustained in the future. Some factors that have contributed to this rapid adoption in our health…
Cardinal Health Foundation awarded nearly $1 million in grants to impact the opioid epidemic across five states. The Foundation’s new Optimal Prescribing in Pain Management (OPPM) initiative engages state pharmacy associations and schools of pharmacy in partnerships that will facilitate efforts by pharmacists to collaborate with other healthcare providers and patients to support optimal medication…
Medication reconciliation is one of the biggest challenges facing health care teams. E3 Learning Collaborative team, Minnesota Hospital Association (MHA) developed a tool to help guide hospitals in a medication reconciliation improvement projects. The three things needed to get stared, include: a multidisciplinary improvement team, leadership support, and the MHA road map.
Establishing both internal and external partnerships is critical to sustaining and scaling successful pharmacy medication management services. When there are limited resources, developing partnerships can be an effective strategy for sustainability and scale. AIMM explores insights from A3 Collaborative participating teams, and how their 12-month learning experience helped them establish and develop critical partnerships to advance medication management services.
A3 Collaborative participating organization, Penobscot Community Health Care is sharing some impressive initial results from its pharmacy department, and in partnership across organizational departments. Using the collaborative learning structure deployed by AIMM, Penobscot pharmacy department wasted no time in strategically planning to meet its goal with support from leaders within, and strong relations across the organization.
This past March marked the end of the initial A3 Collaborative, culminating in a celebration of organizations’ advancements and showcasing results from the 12-month learning experience. Teams shared a broad range of performance outcomes ranging from internal structure and process improvements, to clinical outcomes improvements, to reductions in hospital readmissions. Results such as: reducing 90-day readmissions by 59%; in another example: a net Return on Investment (ROI) of $486,304 (141%); and a third: total cost avoided of $870,000. As AIMM readies to launch the 2018/2019 A3 Collaborative, we are hearing from participating individuals: “the collaborative creates a learning experience that optimizes the potential to learn from other pharmacists and systems who may be on the same path of improvement but at different stages. This sharing of knowledge has been key to my progress…”