KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Kansas City pharmacy chain Balls Food Stores was honored with the American Pharmacist’s Association (APhA) Foundation’s 2018 Pinnacle Award during a ceremony at APhA’s headquarters in Washington DC. The Pinnacle Award recognizes a pharmacy or health system that has made a significant contribution to the practice of pharmacy, including services that improve patient outcomes, increase medication adherence, and reduce adverse drug events.

Since opening its first pharmacy in 1993, Balls Food Store’s pharmacies have been innovators in the Kansas City marketplace. Director of pharmacy and whole health Michael Halliwell has spent the past 25 years with Balls Foods continually searching for ways to both improve the quality of pharmacist care provided to their patients and keep their community pharmacies’ doors open through a tumultuous health care market.

A community pharmacy does so much more than putting pills or tablets into a bottle and labeling the medication for dispensing. Balls pharmacy teams provide many clinical services that go above and beyond to protect their patients’ health and wellbeing, including immunizations, medication therapy management, and travel health consultations. Balls Foods pharmacies is one of only two retail pharmacy chains in the nation to provide pharmacogenomics testing, which can help assess if a medication is safe and effective based on an individual’s genetics.

The pharmacists of Balls Food Stores put a particular focus on ensuring that patients adhere to their medications as directed – as former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Coop, said, “Drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them.” With medication non-adherence estimated to cause around 125,000 deaths annually and cost the health care system over $100 billion per year, pharmacists provide a critical service in ensuring effective medication use. Using a computer system that Balls Food’s pharmacists helped develop, their pharmacies were able to improve patient adherence to medications for diabetes and heart conditions. The system is carefully crafted to focus on a patient’s health and addressing any problems with medications, instead of an automatic refill system to simply fill a prescription more often.

Balls Foods Pharmacy team not only cares for their patients at their 20 pharmacies, but also has a specially trained team of pharmacists caring for around 400 employees and spouses on their self-insured health care plan. The Start Now program focuses on individuals with diabetes and/or cardiovascular disease, using pharmacists to educate patients on self-care of their disease state, as well as work with their primary care teams to optimize the medications the patient use to treat those conditions. Participants show dramatic improvements in their conditions while participating in the Start Now program, including improvements in their blood sugar, cholesterol, and blood pressure numbers. These pharmacists also administer nearly 1,000 biometric screenings annually, educating individuals on the basics of their health.