Telehealth
Kevin Willmann
Pharmacy services—like everything else—changed during the COVID-19 pandemic as patients used telehealth not only for physician visits, but for whatever needs they would normally go to their local pharmacy to meet.
“COVID was our giant real-life experience. We tested it then, and we know it works,” said Starlin Haydon-Greatting, BSPharm, MPH, who serves as the Illinois Pharmacists Association’s director of clinical programs and population health. “It’s moved us toward ‘I talked with someone on Facetime; why can’t I continue to do this?’ ”
As a response to COVID-19, the federal government relaxed restrictions that were in place at the time and that had previously prevented virtual pharmacy services under the telehealth umbrella to take off. Federal agencies, such as DEA, issued temporary regulations during the pandemic allowing the prescription of controlled substances without an in-person patient visit. In November 2024, these rules received a third extension set to expire at the end of 2025, unless extended once again or made permanent. For Medicare patients, telehealth services have been extended until September 30, 2025.
With an extension granted once again, has telehealth become such a convenience for patients that it is like the proverbial genie that cannot be put back in the bottle?
Evidence
After government restrictions were loosened to allow pharmacies to operate under the telehealth umbrella during the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact was immediate.
An analysis from Frost and Sullivan found that telehealth visits increased 50% in March 2020. Dana Lichtenberg, assistant director of congressional affairs at the American Medical Association, said in a May 2020 webinar that the telehealth policy changes were a “linchpin, sea-change moment” that normally would have taken 3 to 5 years to complete.
Additionally, authors of a review published April 12, 2025, in Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy concluded that virtual care in community pharmacy “showed promise in enhancing pharmacy services.”
The review referenced two studies in JAPhA from 2012 and 2020 to make the case that virtual care was identified “as a valuable tool for managing chronic diseases in community pharmacy” in the United States, giving pharmacists the ability to provide ongoing management of chronic conditions remotely. The 2012 JAPhA study illustrated the use of telephone conversations by pharmacists to support patients with diabetes, address missed refills, as well as co-developing self-management action plans.
The 2020 JAPhA study by Updike and colleagues reported that, there “was a statistically significant increase in patients’ knowledge of BP and an improvement in the recommended lifestyle modifications....The patients responded positively to using the Bluetooth-enabled BP monitor and telehealth for receiving health care services.”
Chronic disease management
Haydon-Greatting said the ability for medical professionals to deliver virtual services such as chronic disease management was accelerating in the years before COVID-19.
When virtual care companies began providing services such as free diabetes test strips for self-insured employer groups, they did not include pharmacist management of the patient-care model. As far back as 2010, she and others who were part of the APhA Foundation’s Diabetes Ten City Challenge saw the need for pharmacists to be allowed to deliver care via telehealth. By 2018, Haydon-Greatting and others were developing workflows for a hybrid model to help the national diabetes prevention program apply to CDC and CMS to deliver pharmacy services via telehealth.
Then when COVID-19 hit in 2020, Haydon-Greatting said they rolled everything out as best as they could.
She said the diabetes prevention programs she participates in use remote, digital technology to collect data from patients.
“We have a Bluetooth scale where [patients] can weigh themselves digitally, they take their blood pressure though a digital pressure cuff,” she said.
Even new technologies, like AI, can be used in remote patient monitoring, with the ability to indicate if a patient may need to call a physician if the data received from the patient requires it.
AI can also play the role of an interpreter between patients, their pharmacist, and other medical professionals.
All of these opportunities offered by telehealth are improving efficiencies in the pharmacy experience, Haydon-Greatting said. She added that she sees telehealth becoming a necessary part of pharmacy practice in the next 5 to 10 years, especially among the younger generation.
“People want to have a digital option,” she said. ■