VHA National Center for Patient Safety

The VA Ask A Pharmacist App is available at mobile.va.gov.

While working as a VA staff pharmacist in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Eric Spahn became interested in the pharmacy information on My HealtheVet, the VA’s online self-management portal for Veteran patients. Spahn thought that having a way for Veterans to speak with pharmacists directly would be an added benefit and fit well into the overall goals of My HealtheVet. So, he submitted his idea as a clinical content request. Around this same time, My HealtheVet happened to be rolling out Secure Messaging, so they approached him about incorporating his idea onto that platform.

Spahn originally suggested creating pharmacy triage groups in Secure Messaging, so Veterans could send a message to a general pharmacy group called “Ask a Pharmacist.” To help manage the potential volume of such a tool, the technology request was coupled with the expectation that each VA facility assign pharmacy staff to participate.

Not only was the Ask a Pharmacist idea useful to patients, but caregivers and staff also began to use it to send questions to pharmacy 24 hours a day. It really caught on. But something was missing. Spahn still wanted to provide access to general medication information, especially VA-specific pharmacy data. This led him to submit a proposal for a simple medication-informational app, which also encouraged the use of the Ask a Pharmacist Secure Messaging effort that he was marketing.

“There’s so much information on the internet, that it is difficult to know what medication information you can trust,” said Spahn. “Don’t go to a blog or some random website. Here are VA trusted sites anyone can use to find general medication information that has been vetted by the VA pharmacy program.”

Thus, the Ask a Pharmacist app was officially created and released in 2016, and it compared favorably with the private sector. Veterans can find resources, ask questions and know that their VA pharmacist or pharmacy technician will respond. VA also partnered with the National Library of Medicine and VA Medication Image Library (MIL) to include a link to Pillbox, to help identify unknown pills (oral, solid-dosage form medications), which uses many of its images from the VA MIL.

The Ask a Pharmacist app provides an example of the VA patient-centric prescription label to help users understand how to administer their medicine safely. A plethora of information exists online, but the app uses VA sites or content from other “dot-gov” sites, such as fda.gov. The app also provides general questions and answers to much of the pharmacy information available on My HealtheVet.

As of the first quarter for fiscal year 2018, there were more than 520,000 active users of pharmacy triage groups in Secure Messaging. VA pharmacists answered more than 33,000 pharmacy questions in that quarter alone. In addition to supporting automation of prescription refill and tracking services, both apps are answering Veterans’ questions and reducing call-center volume.

In addition to the Ask a Pharmacist app, Spahn has also been involved with the recently released Rx Refill mobile application. The Office of Connected Care wanted to enhance what they had previously piloted, so they worked together and created some mockups to improve its ease of use and refill tracking features.

Rx Refill went live as a web-based mobile application last year. The soon-to-be-released iOS update will allow Veterans to download it to their iPhones. The team is also considering a native app for the Android platform. That will be great, since Veterans can just open it and refill their meds with the push of a couple of buttons.

Eric Spahn, Pharm.D., was also recently featured on The Patient Safety Huddle Podcast. Click on the link to learn more about how the app was developed and its unique features to help Veterans better manage their prescriptions.

To download the Ask a Pharmacist, Rx Refill and other VA mobile applications, go to https://mobile.va.gov/ appstore/.