Spreeha Choudhury, Associate in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, authored an article in Pharmacy Times, titled “Implications for Pharmacies Navigating Shared Clinical Decision-Making in Vaccination.”
Following is an excerpt:
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has recently embraced shared clinical decision-making (SCDM) as a framework for certain vaccine recommendations. This type of recommendation seeks to foster health care decisions that are jointly made by patients and health care providers, emphasizing the need for detailed discussions over automatic vaccine administration. Although this approach is commendable for its patient-centered nature, it introduces several operational challenges, particularly within the pharmacy setting. These challenges are often exacerbated by the inconsistencies in state laws regarding pharmacists' scope of practice, despite their extensive training in patient assessments and clinical decision-making.
Pharmacies—particularly community, chain, and independent pharmacies—are crucial venues for implementing these new vaccination strategies, given their accessibility and frequency of interactions with the public. However, the SCDM model demands more than the traditional roles assigned to pharmacists, requiring an enhanced level of patient engagement, medical knowledge, and legal authority to implement effectively. Pharmacists face various legal and practical barriers across different states when trying to adopt SCDM in their practice.
