Chisholm-Burns and team complete study of pharmacists' value

Marie Chisholm-Burns, head of the college’s Department of Pharmacy Practice and Science, and a team of researchers in July completed a comprehensive evaluation of existing studies that examined the value pharmacists bring to patient care.

Chisholm-Burns is the principal investigator on the research project “Demonstrating Pharmacists’ Impact on Therapeutic, Safety, Humanistic and Economic Health Outcomes: Systematic Review and Meta-analyses.”

She was joined on the project by (from left in photo) Jeannie Lee and Rick Herrier from COP, Sandra Kramer from the Arizona Health Sciences Library, and Tim Wunz, (Chisholm-Burns), Clara Ehrman and Christina Spivey of COP. Not pictured are Marion Slack, Elizabeth Hall-Lipsy and Ivo Abraham of COP and Jennifer Martin from the Arizona Health Sciences Library.

The project was funded by a grant from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Foundation in May 2008. According to Chisholm-Burns, many applied for the grant and the UA College of Pharmacy team received the only awarded grant.

“This was an ambitious project performed by a multidisciplinary team,” says Chisholm-Burns. “It was a systematic review by pharmacists, a health economist, physician, attorney, social worker, nurse, two librarians, and an information technologist. We gave the librarians key words for which to search in online databases, and their searches turned up 56,000 references. We ended up manually reviewing about 3,500 articles.”

The team used evidence-based criteria to evaluate the references. Results of randomized, controlled trials were considered the strongest evidence.

“Overall, our findings were positive,” says Chisholm-Burns. “The studies show that pharmacists have a favorable influence on patient outcomes.”

Chisholm-Burns will report the team’s findings in detail at the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in Las Vegas Dec. 6-10.

Posted Sept. 15, 2009