Embedded Pharmacists Are Vital Yet Underutilized in Diabetes Care

With the pharmacist’s well-known positioning to address community-level outcomes on a grand scale, experts believe their inclusion in diabetes care teams is necessary to increase patient touch points and effectively, and proactively, improve outcomes.

“I’ve always said, when patients have access to pharmacists, when that's being done correctly, pharmacists identify so many opportunities to intervene. If the pharmacist is not included, you're missing those opportunities,” Sandra Leal, PharmD, MPH, vice president of pharmacy professional relations at CVS Health, told Drug Topics®. “Really incorporating [pharmacists] as part of the standard of care, I think we would see much more improved results and better outcomes for the patient.”

In this interview, Leal breaks down what truly effective pharmacist integration into a primary care diabetes team looks like, drawing on firsthand experience working across ambulatory care, hospital, and community settings. According to her insights, the ideal model exists, it works, and it is not limited to any single practice environment.

But significant barriers remain. From inconsistent EHR access and restrictive scope-of-practice regulations to the ongoing challenge of building sustainable service models, pharmacists are still too often an afterthought in diabetes care team design.

Leal’s call to action is direct: Pharmacist involvement in diabetes care should be a standard of care; not a best practice reserved for the fortunate few arenas within health care. Patients are missing critical interventions every day that pharmacists are positioned to provide.

READ MORE: Diabetes Resource Center