Q&A: Support, Reimbursement Key For Expanded Pharmacy Services | PQA 2025
Michael Hegener, PharmD, BCACP, discusses how workforce development can best address the evolving knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in community pharmacy practice.
Pharmacists are playing an increasingly important role in community health care, but training and support are needed to help them expand clinical services. Much like the early days of pharmacy-based immunizations, today’s shift toward broader patient care brings its own set of challenges.
Q&A: Support, Reimbursement Key For Expanded Pharmacy Services | PQA 2025 / InfiniteFlow - stock.adobe.com
According to Michael Hegener, PharmD, BCACP, associate professor of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati James L Winkle College of Pharmacy, workforce development is essential to prepare pharmacists for leadership in health care delivery. However, a major barrier is the lack of clear reimbursement models, which discourages service expansion. Creative solutions and stronger collaboration between pharmacists and payers are needed to move the profession forward.
READ MORE: Confidence, Collaboration Key For Advancing Community Pharmacy Services | PQA 2025
At the PQA 2025 Annual Meeting, held May 19 to 21 in Tampa, Florida, Drug Topics® sat down with Hegener to discuss how workforce development can best address the evolving knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in community pharmacy practice, how collaboration with health plans and pharmacy employers might enhance the implementation of practice redesign initiatives, and advice he would give to pharmacists who may want to start clinical services but are hesitant due to lack of payment.
Drug Topics: How can workforce development best address the evolving knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in community pharmacy practice?
Michael Hegener, PharmD, BCACP: Workforce development is obviously one of the big players. There's a lot of different players going on at once. We want to make sure that the frontline pharmacists in the community setting feel confident and prepared. I remember when pharmacists first started to immunize. Pharmacists were scared to do it. People would even quit where they were practicing pharmacy if they were told they had to do it, because they were just scared. A lot of that was they just didn't have the confidence or the skill set in their minds to be successful. For workforce development, it would be empowering the frontline pharmacist to know they can do it, giving them the experiences to practice and talk to others that have done it to build that confidence and also know how to navigate the healthcare team at the pharmacy. Pharmacists will likely be seen more as the leader, which they are, but also the delegator, who delegates a lot of tasks out.
Drug Topics: How might collaboration with health plans and pharmacy employers enhance the implementation of practice redesign initiatives?
Hegener: Collaboration is key. Right now, it seems like there's pharmacists that are able to do things, but they're hesitant because they're not getting paid, because there's not an easy payment mechanism. There's also payers that would likely want to pay pharmacists to do some of these great services. The problem is, if the pharmacists aren't doing it to show the payers they can do it, why are the payers going to pay for something they don't feel confident the pharmacist can do? It's kind of like we're both holding back a little bit, and we need to collaborate and just make it happen.
Drug Topics: What advice would you give to pharmacists who may want to start clinical services but are hesitant due to lack of payment?
Hegener: There are opportunities to do things and have reimbursement maybe come down the road later. There's ways you can partner with universities where they have faculty members who are being paid by the university, and they can dedicate some of their time to help with these services, show that they're successful, and promote the successfulness by publishing the information. It is hard though for a pharmacy to try to proactively do things without getting paid. You have to be innovative and find those things, like finding that faculty member, collaborating with a college or university, or even leveraging the benefit of having pharmacy students with you because they're eager and excited about the future of pharmacy. They could help do some of these things while you're not paying a full pharmacist salary for them.
