Research

In medication adherence, I have worked with graduate students to develop a new measure of reasons for medication non-adherence, and we also established different forms/types of non-adherence based upon these reasons. This work, importantly, established a belief-component to forgetting as a reason for medication non-adherence. 

We have AHRQ funding to further develop and test our artificial intelligent agent. Later this year, we will initiate our work on the development and testing of an app that will support selected aspects of medication management for individuals with neurodevelopmental deficits.

In addition, we are working with the Michigan Oncology Quality Consortium to determine how to affect medication adherence to oral oncolytics. Addition work is focused on improving adherence to aromatase inhibitors.

Finally, I am initiating work with colleagues here at UM to examine how PGx testing may impact medication adherence with anti-depressants and symptoms of depression. 

For 20 years, I have studied the impact of pharmacists’ care on processes of care and patient outcomes. I studied the impact of pharmacists’ medication review and medication recommendations to physicians in community pharmacy settings in the mid-2000s, showing that pharmacists may impact medication adherence. As well, I have reported how a comprehensive medication review may impact medication utilization and described new models of pharmacists’ care. Finally, while pharmacists may impact medication discrepancies at discharge, our trial did not show an impact on re-admission.

I have also focused work towards pharmacists’ roles in improving public health delivery. My most recent work is focused on pharmacists’ roles in reducing unintended pregnancy. I showed that pharmacies can be a useful channel to delivering passive social marketing messages and that these messages decreased the rate of decline in condom sales in intervention pharmacies. As well, we have shown that young women have had overall positive experiences with contraceptives in pharmacies and that about half of young women in our study went to a pharmacy at least monthly. These data support the consideration of future interventions in community pharmacies.