Knowledge Knugget: Telepharmacy and Telegenetics

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Welcome to this week’s healthcare Knowledge Knugget! As a part of “The Executive Innovation Show” podcast, we’re bringing you the hot topics, questions we receive each week and game-changing ideas, best practices and tips. Today’s topic comes from Dr. Richard Harris.

Dr. Richard Harris is the Founder of Great Health and Wellness, a personalized medicine company in Houston, Texas. He is both a physician and a pharmacist. 

Today he is going to talk about how you can extend telepharmacy into the home, the future role of the pharmacist and how to improve health through prescription adherence. Lastly, we’ll be talking about genetics testing. Is this telehealth service of telegenetics best staffed by physicians or by pharmacists? 

What role can pharmacists play in patients’ supplements and diet? 

Dr. Harris believes that pharmacists can play an extremely large role in this area and that will allow them to practice at the top of their license. Hear what else he has to say by listening. 

How can pharmacists extend the services to the home with telepharmacy? 

A big way the pharmacist can extend services to home with telepharmacy is adherence to medications and side effects. We know that in the real world there's about a 50 to 60% medication adherence rate, but we estimate that in order to be successful, therapy needs to be around 80% adherent. So pharmacists, by doing checkups in the home through telepharmacy could ensure adherence rates and better optimization and outcomes to therapy. 

Pharmacists can also do health coaching, where they're walking people through other things associated with that disease state and they can also provide direct patient care through telepharmacy. 

Whose role is it to help patients better understand genetic testing and patient outcomes?

As an internal medicine physician, a lot of Dr. Harris’ colleagues are not very interested in this subject at all, which he feels is a shame because genetic testing, a new neutral genomic testing can really be a game-changer for someone's chronic conditions or for preventative states. 

He thinks the pharmacist can take a very proactive role in this area to offer these services in the clinic and be taught how to provide high-quality information about Nutrigenomix in genetic testing. And then at the same time recommend high-quality GMP supplements. 

He also states that pharmacists have a better understanding of general physiology because he has gone through both trainings as a pharmacist and a physician. 

That has been today's Knowledge Knugget with Dr. Richard Harris. I hope you found the information informative and helpful. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter or his podcast, The Strive For Great Health. 

That's today's healthcare Knowledge Knugget, part of The Executive Innovation Show. Feel free to submit questions or be featured on the Knowledge Knugget. Subscribe to our YouTube, Vimeo, and the podcast channels to get your Knowledge Knugget on Thursdays.

Download our playbook where we define "What is Telehealth?". We go over specialty areas such as telepharmacy and telegenetics. This playbook is packed with useful information for you to consume. Get it here.