In July 2018, the CMM Effectiveness and Implementation Grant study team released The Patient Care Process for Delivering Comprehensive Medication Management (CMM): Optimizing Medication Use in Patient-Centered, Team-Based Care Settings. Establishing a common method for delivering CMM is important to ensure a consistent approach to optimizing medication use that improves patient care. Articulating a coherent, reproducible approach helps clinicians adhere to key steps in the process and makes explicit the minimum steps needed to provide CMM.

To arrive at a “common language” for the CMM patient care process, the study team relied on rigorous research methods to define a “usable innovation” for optimizing medication use in patients with multiple chronic conditions who are taking multiple medications. The concept of a usable innovation is derived from the implementation science literature, which establishes specific criteria for an innovative intervention or service that can reliably produce outcomes. This intervention/service must be implemented consistently and must include:

• A clear description of the guiding principles or philosophy of practice.
• A clear description of the “essential functions” that frame the service.
• A clear description of the “operational definitions” that explicitly define how each essential function will be operationalized.
• A practical assessment of the performance of practitioners who are delivering the service (i.e., fidelity, which helps ensure that the intervention is being implemented as intended).

This document defining the CMM process of care is one of many resources being developed as a result of research supported by ACCP and the ACCP Foundation. The document is intended for use by clinical pharmacists to ensure that CMM is understood and valued as distinct from, but complementary to, the routine care delivered by a patient’s physician or other care provider. This defined process of CMM delivery also allows the interdisciplinary team of health care providers and staff to understand the ways in which various members of the team contribute to a patient care process that optimizes medication use. Although based on research in primary care, the patient care process for delivering CMM can be adapted to other practice settings (e.g., acute care, specialty practice).

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