Shaping plan PHOTO CREDIT: DANIEL MILLER Sabbatical affords Curt Black, BPharm, PhD, time and resources to shape MTM in Ohio in clinical decision making. Our inroad was in hospitals in the 1970s; in the 1980s, it was nursing homes. And now, I think time for the community pharmacists to take the lead. This is the decade of Curtis Black, BPharm, PhD, is a man with a plan. Black spent a year giving shape and structure to the workability of medication therapy management (MTM) in the state of Ohio. Having taken a sabbatical from teaching pharmacy at the University of Toledo (UT), Black, current Merck Professor of Clinical Pharmacy, committed to working with the Ohio Pharmacists Association (OPA) on its disease state management and medication therapy management (DSM/MTM) task force. Black would be an essential participant in the task effort to take a basic MTM promises to be to patients, pharmacists, providers, and roll it a more solid shape: a strategic plan to implement MTM services statewide. Black felt that while MTM services were viewed positively by most Ohio pharmacists, certain fundamental implementation problems kept them from working MTM into their daily routines. Ohio, Black told Pharmacy Today, is home to a collaborative practice act that is in its wording. cumbersome and he said. a result, many Ohioans have not been offered the types of advanced care or MTM-type services pharmacists can Pitching the sabbatical Black has been on long-range planning committee for the past few years and is also Vice President of the Ohio Pharmacists Foundation, the and educational arm of over the last couple of years preceding my sabbatical, meetings of long-range strategic planning committee showed that it that pharmacists needed to be convinced that MTM was what needed to be done, but that they needed to see how it could be Black said. pharmacists perceive the barriers they face as being too big for them to be Black recalled a meeting with Marc Sweeney, PharmD, Dean of the School of Pharmacy at Cedarville University, before the sabbatical. Sweeney, who had set up the original DSM/MTM task force while president of OPA, described speaking with pharmacists who had been frustrated with roadblocks to implementing MTM services: how to get reimbursement and how to manage concerns. Together, Black and Sweeney discussed the concerted effort that needed to be made to identify these barriers and ways to resolve them. Black proposed working on his sabbatical to establish a strategic plan to identify and the core areas DSM/MTM task force needed to address. Incoming OPA President Dave Boyer agreed; Black then submitted his sabbatical proposal to UT and received approval in March 2009. Next, the two men built on the core of the DSM/MTM task force membership to assemble a group of more than 60 Ohio pharmacists from all different types of care, community, chain, independent, and hospital develop the strategic plan. www.pharmacytoday.org The decade of MTM Black has been striving to improve pharmacy practice and to focus it on patient care since the 1970s. always enjoyed working with patients. My own area of practice was oncology, and as that practice moved from the hospital setting to primarily outpatient treatment during the 1990s, I became more aware of the important role that community pharmacists can and do play in day-to-day patient he told Today. Black believes that it is time for pharmacists to maximize their potential in the community setting and optimize medication therapy. what drives he explained. always been my dream to see the pharmacist playing an important role 26 PHARMACY TODAY APRIL 2010