Directly Speaking - Tell Me Your PPMI Stories!

by Scott A. Meyers, Executive Vice President
August 15, 2012

For those of you whose pharmacy departments have completed the ASHP Pharmacy Practice Model Initiative (PPMI) Hospital Self-Assessment (HSA), go ahead and skip down to the third paragraph.  I don’t need to beg, cajole, lecture or bribe you!  For those of you who work at the vast majority of Illinois Hospitals that have yet to complete the HSA, what’s up with that?  Yes, it is 106 questions that take some time to answer, but don’t you want to see where your department sits in comparison to the other hospitals of Illinois or across the nation?  More importantly, don’t you want to see what the PPMI is all about?  Most importantly, don’t you want to see if there are better ways to provide the best care for your patients?

Completing the PPMI HSA won’t give you all the ways to provide the best care for your patients, but it will certainly help you identify the direction in which your department needs to move to get there.  So please, take the time to either complete the HSA for your department or to delegate it to someone you know will answer honestly and completely.

Now for the real purpose of this article!  ICHP has provided programming to help pharmacy departments move forward with the PPMI.  This year’s Annual Meeting programming consists of a “State of the State” update as well as several pearls that you can use at your facility to move closer to achieving your PPMI goal!  ICHP will continue to provide opportunities for our members to learn from each other so that there is less “recreating the wheel” and more collaboration to reach goals and the development of best practices from which all can benefit.

The best part is we need your help!  Why is this good?  It’s good because we know that there are pioneers in Illinois who have set their sights on a best practice pharmacy practice model!  It’s good because, by helping us, you can be recognized for the hard work you’ve already done and receive praise and appreciation for those who you may help get to the same level.  It’s good because even those who are out in front with the PPMI probably have some areas where they just haven’t had time to focus and they can benefit from your work as well.   

Sharing stories of success is sometimes viewed as bragging.  But to me, if offered in the right light these stories can be nurturing, helpful and practical.  As we put this year’s Annual Meeting Pearls sessions together, we struggled to find folks who had the right “fixes”.  We could have used a few more people who were happy to share their successes and didn’t think of the sharing as bragging.  None of the pearl presenters we found bragged to us, as a matter of fact, we just about had to pull their success stories out of them!

I am asking each pharmacy department to focus on the PPMI and then to let me know where you have encounter success.  This will help ICHP plan for future educational offerings and may also be helpful when creating toolkits or other resources to help all of our member’s departments reach their PPMI goals.  Unfortunately, you can’t tell us your successes without first looking at the contents of the PPMI and the HSA first.  But I digress.

I’m also asking each pharmacy department to tell me where they are struggling.  I promise I won’t publicize, ridicule, or even cajole.  I recognize that this is a big project for anyone, so how could I point a finger?  But the more departments that share their struggles, the easier it will be for ICHP to identify those who can help you fix them!  

Being part of the PPMI can force dramatic changes in thinking, processing and practice.  It creates change and change is always uncomfortable (at first).  The Affordable Care Act, whether you support it or not, is causing change in the way healthcare is provided in the U.S.  The SMART Act (Illinois’ recent Medicaid Reform bill – see The GAS From Springfield) is causing change in how we care for Medicaid patients in Illinois.  Believing the phrase “change is not easy, but it is simple” will help you deal with the change.  And remembering that “you get the best efforts from others not by lighting a fire under them, but by building a fire within them” (Bob Nelson) will help you motivate your staff or colleagues through these changes.

Tell me your PPMI stories and I promise that good things will come from it.  Help ICHP help you and others to bring practice model improvement all across Illinois! ?

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