Pharmacy Home Visits Employed To Reduce Hospital Readmissions

We follow William Vouk on a medications house call in a Lincoln Park home.

Pharmacist William Vouk listens to Patricia Johnson while visiting her in her home recently. Vouk is part of an insurer-funded program where pharmacists visit people shortly after their release from a hospital to get their medications sorted out. The program reduces the number of hospital readmissions. Patricia Johnson is surprised, but welcoming, when William Vouk comes to her door.

A pharmacist, Vouk had made an appointment to visit with Johnson in her traditional, two-story Lincoln Park home. But at 73, and only recently out of rehab care that followed a hospital visit, Johnson simply had forgotten.

It was the hospitalization that had brought Vouk to Johnson’s home. He works for New Jersey-based healthcare provider Tabula Rasa, which has contracted for the past three years with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota to provide post-hospital pharmacy visits for a certain group of its members.

The goal: To keep those members from returning to the hospital anytime soon.