Get the Medications Right Institute Marks Three Years of Impact in Health Care

The Get the Medications Right Institute (GTMRx) (@GTMRxInstitute) is marking three years as a multi-stakeholder catalyst for change and champion of optimizing medication use through a patient care service called comprehensive medication management (CMM). More than 1,600 individual stakeholders representing 1,000 companies across the employer and health care spectrum have pledged alignment with the movement’s rallying cry: Get the medications right.

Failure to ensure appropriate use of medications is costly. A 2018 study estimated that 275,000 lives are lost and $528.4 billion wasted due to avoidable illness and death resulting from non-optimized medication therapy.

“Getting the medications right is a value driving service for advanced primary care,” said Paul Grundy, MD, MPH, president of the GTMRx Institute and the “godfather” of the patient-centered medical home movement. “A personalized, patient-centered system and a coordinated approach to medications would dramatically improve outcomes, reduce overall costs and improve people’s lives. Health care is a team sport. Physicians should be focusing on just two things: difficult diagnostic dilemmas and relationships. I see a huge uptick in quality of care when there’s a clinical pharmacist on the team.”

In its first year, the GTMRx Institute convened more than 50 thought leaders to develop the essential roadmap — the GTMRx Blueprint for Change.

Since the launch of the Institute in 2019, over 290 instructive tools have been developed to include case studies, use cases, evidence documents and kits that each stakeholder group can use to expand practice and build the case for a better way to manage medications within their sphere of influence.

The COVID-19 pandemic put urgency behind the GTMRx movement as the need for effective, timely treatments and the consequences of inadequate preventive care became an international issue. Underscoring the pandemic’s effects is the need for safe, appropriate, effective medication use process that is team-based and person-centered. The pandemic put a spotlight on the essential need to understand patient’s attitudes, beliefs and preferences and the value of appropriate selection, management and monitoring of each patient’s medication.

“The GTMRx Institute is the only muti-stakeholder effort calling for medication management reform that engages those who pay for care, provide it and receive care,” said Katherine H. Capps, GTMRx Institute co-founder and executive director. “Since we are rapidly moving to a more personalized approach to medication use enabling us to target correct therapies, a collaborative and coordinated approach is needed today more than ever,” she added.

“Everyone has a stake in this because we all know someone who has suffered from medication disasters — getting the wrong medication, the wrong dose, not getting the right one the first time or being on a medication that is not needed,” she said. “CMM is a medical service that is needed now, it is not an after-the-fact utilization review or prior-authorization activity”

The GTMRx Institute has earned a reputation as a neutral, multi-stakeholder convener around critically important health care issues. In 2021, it convened a bi-partisan national task force to identify challenges to widespread vaccination against COVID-19. The group included doctors, nurses, public health leaders, pharmacists, social workers, consumer health advocates and community health representatives. GTMRx recently convened an executive roundtable on payments, policy and practice supporting medication management reform and formed the National Physician Advisory Board and the Employer Advisory Taskforce to advance CMM in practice.

About the Get the Medications Right™ Institute
The GTMRx Institute is a catalyst for change that brings critical stakeholders together, bound by the urgent need to get the medications right. We are physicians, pharmacists, health IT innovators, drug and diagnostics companies, consumer groups, employers, payers and health systems—aligned to save lives and save money through comprehensive medication management. By showcasing evidence and innovation, we motivate practice transformation and push payment and policy reform. Together, we ACT to champion appropriate, effective, safe and precise use of medication and gene therapies.

About GTMRx’s Podcast Voices of Change
We see it every day; needless lives lost and wasted money from the current trial and error approach to medication use. In fact, 275,000 or more lives are lost and at least $528 billion dollars are wasted yearly due to non-optimized medication use. The good news is there are opportunities to control the loss and waste, whether you are involved in receiving, paying for, or delivering care. Living in a world where patients get the right medications, the first time is attainable – and it doesn’t have to take decades to create this world.

Hosted by the GTMRx Institute’s Executive Director and Co-founder, Katie Capps, Voices of Change will feature leaders who have knowledge, experience and ideas to solve this urgent need to getting the medications right. Take a listen!