How Community Pharmacists Are Proactively Managing Patients’ Migraines | NCPA 2025

Through screening, managing medications, and proactively approaching patients, community pharmacists are exhibiting their abilities in guiding patients toward better migraine outcomes.

“What we need is workforce expansion in migraine,” Amaal J. Starling, MD, FAAN, FAHS, associate professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, told Drug Topics. “Right now, we’ve got headache specialists—very few of us—we’ve got general neurologists, we’ve got primary care providers, and we have been working with these 3 groups over the last several decades to try to improve the management of migraine. But we have not been able to significantly move the needle at a population level.”

Along with her colleague and collaborator Courtney Hahs, PharmD, clinical pharmacist at SEMO Rx Pharmacies and SEMO Rx Care Coordination, Starling joined us at the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) 2025 Annual Convention & Expo to discuss the state of migraine care and where pharmacists can fill in significant gaps and support community-wide and nationwide initiatives.

Starling helped identify some of the systemic gaps existing in the migraine care space at the moment; a condition that effects such a large pool of patients but is so rarely explored, according to her. She then passed it to Hahs, who discussed the opportunities for pharmacists to be a crucial touch point for patients in the community and how screening, diagnosing, and management of migraine medications can all be done within community pharmacies.

Listen through to get insights from migraine management and pharmacy experts who are at the forefront of emerging approaches to improving patient outcomes.

Read more of our coverage from NCPA 2025.

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