The Legal Drug Dealer Podcast
Getting Pharmacy as a profession Closer to The Patient
March 3, 2020
Medication Therapy Management
With Swapna Chakrabarti, RPh & Marilena Grittani, RPh
This is a lengthy and very informative episode, with a very close to my heart colleague. Swapna Chakrabarti, RPh.
We are talking about Medication Therapy Management and how patients, caregivers, and family members can benefit from it.
Since it is a service included on Medicare part D plan, if you have more than 5 medications or more than 2 chronic diseases, you should demand it
Some of the most relevant points we made are:
- who is this episode for? This is for patients that are Medicare Part D, and have all the benefits of their insurance because this type of service is included. Not free, but included in what you already paid. So it’s no extra payment. If you are a caregiver for somebody that has Medicare Part B and has medication therapy management as a service as well. And for everybody else that has a family member, a loved one, a parent, a grandparent, an in-law that might be having or that could have issues with their medications, and you know that they need help, but you don’t know what to do
- “I went to pharmacy school in India. And we came here for graduate school, not as a practice not oriented towards practicing pharmacy but more towards the research. So I came to Pittsburgh for my masters and did my masters in medicinal chemistry and I hated it. I don’t know why. But then what I know why because when I was in pharmacy school, the aspect of the medicinal chemistry, which is basically not just the synthesis of drugs, but how the drug actually works in your body, at the chemical level was so fascinating”.
- It’s hard, It is too it’s hard. It’s complicated. It’s not the pharmacist that you see dispensing, filling up the vials with your medication. That is probably the last step in a long series of steps that we have taken to understand your medication. And that’s not the only thing we do
- In the healthcare professions, Pharmacists actually top the lists of the most reliable healthcare professionals and that is definitely a historical reason for it. But we definitely want you to know, that we are not in there just to make money. So then we just fill your prescription bottles and get you out of there as soon as possible. That is not what We want to do so don’t look at us through that lens. We are people, we are compassionate, we want to help you. So if you have to wait a little bit longer to get your prescription at the pharmacy, that’s probably a reason for it.
- I think it’s one of the noblest professions because we are there to help people use our expertise. But yeah, we are people too, we get our frustrating this we have. So when you are dealing with treating them, as we would expect a pharmacist to treat you kindly treat them kindly to as human beings, it’s we are not just in there, just to save face just to make money off of the prescriptions that we are filling for you.
“Every time I call these patients and I talked to them, it’s amazing how many simple things can be changed, can be fixed, can be added and it makes such a big difference in their quality of life, let alone the whole fact that excess of medications are going to cause all kinds of side effects and cost them more.”
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Listen To The Episode Here