Q&A: Making CGM Counseling Work in Community Pharmacies

Effective continuous glucose monitor (CGM) use requires both patient education and pharmacy workflows that support pharmacists’ time. By leveraging frontline pharmacist insights, involving technicians, using multimodal teaching, and advocating for reimbursement, community pharmacies can provide sustainable CGM counseling that improves patient understanding, confidence, and long-term diabetes management outcomes.

Q&A: Making CGM Counseling Work in Community Pharmacies / Pixel-Shot - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics® recently sat down with Morgan Stewart, PharmD, BCACP, BC-ADM, clinical associate professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss how pharmacy teams can integrate CGM counseling into their existing workflow despite time and staffing constraints.

Drug Topics: How can pharmacy teams integrate CGM counseling into their existing workflow despite time and staffing constraints?

Morgan Stewart, PharmD, BCACP, BC-ADM: That's probably the million dollar question. I definitely don't have all of the solutions. I have ideas. I'll be the first to tell you, I'm not a practicing community pharmacist. I am actually in the process of engaging a group of community pharmacists in our area to come up with solutions of how we can do this. I want to hear what's going on. I have a history of working in community as a technician before I went to pharmacy school, but the landscape has changed. I want to preface my response by saying I'm not in it every day like your average community pharmacist. I think engaging those individuals is huge to come up with these solutions.

I have been looking through the literature of how other issues in pharmacy could play into how we can help our pharmacists integrate CGM counseling into their workflow. [One] would be to potentially leverage technician roles. Technicians may be handling the prep work, collecting patient info, printing out manufacturer instructions, setting a time for patients to come back during non-peak hours, where pharmacists can really engage in that higher level education and provide them more in depth training when possible. Leveraging technicians potentially to handle some of that can definitely be useful. Potentially, as well, offering patients multimodal education. Maybe the pharmacist has them watch a video before they come in and answer the questions afterwards, to help reduce the amount of time that pharmacists need to spend face to face with that patient. Even having a short initial consult, and then follow ups after that where we're providing education. Sometimes if you spend 30 minutes providing this comprehensive education, [something] like 20% of it is remembered. Doing a targeted intervention or a targeted piece of education and coming back a week later to reinforce or answer questions as they come up.

Ultimately, the biggest thing we can do with our pharmacy teams right now is advocate. I know there's a national movement about this in our pharmacy profession, but really advocating for policy change and reimbursement changes that would allow pharmacists to be compensated for device education, which I think ultimately would make it more sustainable.

Drug Topics: Is there anything else you wanted to say?

Stewart: Pharmacists are doing an amazing job—we saw that in this study—of being able to be approachable, accessible providers.¹ With the opportunities we saw in this study to be able to really work with pharmacists and better support them, to be able to go out and provide patients the best care, will ultimately help not just patients do better with their devices, but will help pharmacists feel more comfortable with the devices and be able to support the best they can.

READ MORE: Diabetes Resource Center

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References

1. Stewart MP, Loera LJ, Onwukwe, et al. Assessing the accessibility and accuracy of pharmacist counseling for continuous glucose monitoring: A secret shopper study of community pharmacies. J Am Pharm Assoc. 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.japh.2025.102493