The Global Healthy Living Foundation (GHLF) recently published a study, “Removing Barriers to Pharmacy Vaccination: A Path to Better Health and Lower Health Care Costs,” covering the regulations that tend to prevent pharmacists from being able to efficiently provide vaccines to adult patients.
Robert Popovian, PharmD, MS, Founder, Conquest Advisors and Chief Science Policy Officer, GHLF; Esteban Rivera, MS, Associate Director of Data Science, GHLF; and Dr. Wayne Winegarden, PhD, Senior Fellow in Business and Economics at the Pacific Research Institute and Director of PRI’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation conducted the study, which underscores the important role pharmacists play in adult vaccination efforts and the need for regulatory reform. The authors used the recently-approved RSV vaccine as a case study to illustrate significant cost savings and health benefits of allowing pharmacists to administer vaccines.
However, the study found that state regulations can cause unnecessary delays in vaccine availability at pharmacies – sometimes up to a year and a half – impacting patient health, increasing costs, and potentially leading patients to forgo the vaccine altogether. This can have a greater impact on lower-income communities, where there is greater access to pharmacies than health care provider offices.
The authors of the study recognize that while there may not be a straightforward solution, it is a clear-cut solution – allow pharmacists an “equivalent authority” to physicians in administering vaccines upon either Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval or Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommendation. The authors believe this would help to promote equity in health care access and raise vaccination rates to recommended levels.
Additionally, it may result in cost savings as pharmacy vaccinations tend to be less expensive than those administered in traditional medical settings. It may result in additional cost-savings as the cost of administering a vaccine in a pharmacy is significantly lower than the costs of treating a vaccine-preventable disease.
However, one of the biggest hurdles that such a proposal faces is the wide variation in state regulatory pathways for pharmacist-administered vaccinations. The authors identified nine different pathways with as many as five steps for pharmacists to navigate.
“Post-pandemic data unequivocally reveals adult patients’ preference for vaccinations at pharmacies, with nearly 90 percent of immunizations provided by pharmacists or pharmacy technicians. In 2023, this preference was underscored as over 80 percent of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines were administered at pharmacies across the United States,” noted Dr. Popovian. “The convoluted web of state laws regulating pharmacist vaccination authority leads to negative economic impacts and, most critically, denies patients access to care at their preferred location — the local pharmacy.”
“One of the most important things the study does is get our arms around the trunk of the tree of this Byzantine system we have in terms of the states imposing regulations,” remarked Dr. Winegarden. “Remember, these vaccines are already FDA approved, so all of these delays and costs really aren’t adding anything in terms of patient safety or vaccine efficacy.”