Project Destiny: fixing a broken healthcare system
Is it community pharmacy’s destiny to become a fully realized, universally embraced and fairly compensated partner in the nation’s healthcare delivery network? The leaders of the pharmacy industry’s best-known advocacy groups think so.
Those leaders—Steve Anderson, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores; Bruce Roberts, executive vice president and CEO of the National Community Pharmacists Association; and John Gans, executive vice president and CEO of the American Pharmacists Association—have embarked on a mission that will likely come to define the whole course of their professional careers. That mission goes beyond the ongoing battles each of them leads each week against a seemingly endless litany of threats to community pharmacy’s interests, such as Medicaid reimbursement cuts, mandatory mail-order programs, federal restrictions on e-prescribing of controlled substances or slow payments for Medicare Part D prescriptions.
What Anderson, Roberts and Gans are really leading is a quest to change the fundamental, underlying perceptions of payers, politicians, policy makers and the public at large regarding the value of retail pharmacy. Under the umbrella of the aptly named Coalition for Community Pharmacy, the three organization leaders came together last summer to launch the latest in a long line of industry initiatives aimed at boosting the role and visibility of pharmacy as a key member of the nation’s healthcare delivery system.
They dubbed the campaign Project Destiny. It was, they said, “a joint effort to develop a new vision for pharmacists’ interactions with their patients and for community pharmacy’s advancement of health care in the United States.”
What sets Project Destiny apart from previous efforts is the sheer scope and ambition of the campaign. It brings together Anderson’s vision for a massive public relations effort on behalf of community pharmacy’s value perception and the efforts of on-the-ground pharmacy practitioners engaged in real-world clinical programs to advance patient health.
If successful, Project Destiny will help drive the industry’s adoption of new practice models that incorporate widely recognized standards for patient care and education. Equally important, it will help convince payers, patients and their physicians that pharmacy has a major role to play in front-line health care and prevention—and deserves a fair reimbursement for advancing patients’ well-being and holding down long-term costs.
Perhaps Anderson put it best when he asserted, “The healthcare system has not yet realized the full potential of pharmacists in lowering overall healthcare costs.” Project Destiny, he said, “will define and expand dramatically the possibilities for efficiency and improved patient outcomes.”