The diabetes-specific tasks, Hemoglobin A1c Monitoring and Blood Pressure Monitoring, are designed to capture a baseline and continued progress for your diabetes patients. These Tasks are generated for high-risk diabetes patients, and provide you an opportunity to discuss not only the current state of the values, but also a plan for progressing toward a specific goal, as needed.

To begin the task, select "Start". The trend of any prior values on file is displayed at the top, and directly beneath the interactive graph, you can add in another value by selecting "+ Result". Document the value, who obtained the value, the date obtained, and click "Save". Then, select any other interventions performed and education provided by clicking the applicable boxes. You also have a second opportunity to quickly document the most recent value in the Interventions section.

You can also jot down notes or indicate any related items from other sections of the profile as needed, like conditions or drug therapy problems.

Once you've captured all the pertinent details, click "Continue" to automatically generate applicable documents (like eCare Plans for CPESN member pharmacies), or click "Save and Close" if you want to pause your work and come back to it later.

As always, DocStation relies on the pharmacist's knowledge of the patient when it comes to relevancy of tasks, so if a task is not relevant to the patient, or if the patient refuses the consultation, or something else comes up that prevents you from completing the task, you can archive it instead. Select the (...) icon on the right side of the task card, then select "Archive" and choose the most applicable reason. Then select "Archive Task". If you've already started the task but decide to archive it instead, select the same (...) menu and select "Archive".

You can also filter your patient list for patients who either don't have a value documented, or whose values are outside a specific range. Select your diabetes patients by either clicking the card on the dashboard, or by adding "diabetes" to the patient list, then select the appropriate filter and set the value.

This trick is especially helpful when working toward capturing BP and A1c values for the value-based payment model.

Some of our pharmacy partners have reported that providers are pushing back and/or refusing to provide these lab values for some patients. This is an unfortunate reality as we not only work to advance the pharmacy practice, but disrupt the status quo of healthcare. 

If you find yourself in this situation, it may help to understand the approach one of our pharmacy partners took. While talking with the provider, the pharmacist said, "Providing MTM services is a vital part of the care we provide at our pharmacy, but not knowing if our mutual patient is reaching their treatment goals prevents us from seeing the complete picture of how the patient is responding. Having this information, and thus a more complete picture, helps us better support the patient and your work as a provider."

This document can be used in your communications to smooth this process. Please let us know if you'd like to see changes to it. Keep up the great work!

Diabetes Tasks Rationale - Letter to Physician