By Katherine Capps, Co-Founder and Executive Director, GTMRx Institute
June 25, 2019
Time flies under normal circumstances. These days, it feels like light speed.
June 17 marked two months since the official launch of the GTMRx Institute. On that same day, the GTMRx board of directors welcomed our newest founding funder, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), represented by CEO Paul Abramowitz, PharmD., SC.D. (HON), FASHP.
We’ll have some big news to celebrate when we hold our next board meeting this week. Since our launch on April 17, we have had added more than 300 signing members (representing more than 200 organizations) to the Institute! This is a major accomplishment, supported by both our board and many of our early members. We have set an ambitious pace, but this is a marathon, not a sprint.
The first three webinars from the GTMRx Learning Network brought hundreds of participants for the live event (more downloaded the recording) from across the stakeholder spectrum—health plans, university pharmacy programs, policy makers, technology innovators, physicians, media influencers among them. We are grateful to our presenting partners who shared their knowledge: Jonathan Watanabe of the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (a Fellow of the National Academy of Science); Jan Hirsch of the School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine; Anthony Morreale and Julie Groppi of the Department of Veterans Affairs. I’m also grateful to our board members, Terry McInnis and Allison Hickey, who presented on these webinars.
The goal of the GTMRx Learning Network is to educate and inform, using evidence from the field, so we can educate the market about the importance of optimizing medication use, showcase expert practices that have successfully implemented CMM-level services and begin the dialog around the importance of health IT and diagnostics to enable appropriate medication use. The webinars, as well as the issue briefs that bring key insights into written form and extend learning, are building blocks in the work to create a common understanding of a systematic, evidence-based approach to medications and their rational use.
Over the next several weeks, we will be forming our working groups in practice transformation and health IT to overcome barriers to broad adoption and support for comprehensive medication management (CMM) services, diagnostics to support CMM, and reform to payment and policy. Founding funders and executive members will lead these groups, but we’ll be tapping our signing members to constitute them fully.
Diversity of membership is crucial to ensuring CMM is integrated in a collaborative practice environment. The GTMRx Institute has a number of physicians, pharmacists, caregivers, health IT innovators, drug and diagnostics companies, consumer groups, employers, payers and health systems on board. As Paul Grundy is fond of saying, CMM is a team sport. It is important that we engage physicians and other key stakeholders in our working groups, to enable the team-based care we all need and want.
These multi-stakeholder working groups will inform a blueprint for action. If optimizing medication use is important to you, please email [email protected] so we can discuss how you can get involved in the working groups. Only members of the GTMRx Institute in agreement with our belief statements will be invited to participate, so if you haven’t yet done so, please join us today. Let’s leverage this strong start and work together to get the medications right.
