March 7, 2011 
Collaborative practice agreements (aka collaborative drug therapy management) are legal documents between a specific pharmacist and physician to allow the pharmacist to have more direction in the care of the patient relative to their medications. Given the challenge of the physician to keep up with all the mediations and their lack of access to plan design information and full drug history, I’m surprised that these documents haven’t become more popular.
My guess is that the logistics of a one-to-one legal document around standards of care is complex to scale (see how to set up). But, I always think about how easy this could be for addressing formulary management. The physician could agree to which drugs they considered therapeutically equivalent. They could then tell the pharmacist to choose the drug which was lowest cost for the patient.
Enabling Healthy Decisions 
By far the biggest challenge to healthcare today is achieving better patient outcomes while making healthcare more affordable. The spiraling cost of healthcare has resulted in the emergence of both consumer-directed healthcare (which reduced cost but health outcomes suffered) and collaborative care (Us) as solutions to reducing costs and improving care.
Collaborative care by definition provides a common view of a patient’s health in order to foster better decisions which improve the outcome and affordability of healthcare. The electronic sharing of patient health records between payers, providers and patients ultimately will empower the consumer to make better healthcare decisions.