I respectfully urge you to sign Assembly Bill 2571 (Flora).
AB 2571 addresses a significant barrier to expanding access to pharmacist-provided patient care in California: the lack of a consistent and sustainable mechanism to reimburse pharmacists for clinical services they are already authorized and trained to provide.
The bill establishes reimbursement standards for pharmacist-provided services, including but not limited to medication therapy management, and requires health plans and insurers to reimburse participating pharmacists for covered services provided within their lawful scope of practice. Importantly, subject to federal approval, AB 2571 also provides a pathway for Advanced Practice Pharmacists to be recognized as reimbursable providers in federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics.
AB 2571 is fundamentally a patient-access measure. Pharmacists are among California’s most accessible health care professionals and are uniquely positioned to help address gaps in primary and chronic disease care. Yet authorization to provide a service does little to improve access if there is no sustainable mechanism to support delivery of that care.
This is particularly important for Californians living in rural and underserved communities, where shortages of primary care providers and other health professionals can make timely access to care difficult. Enabling pharmacists to contribute more fully to team-based care can expand the capacity of California’s existing health care workforce without creating a new category of health care professional or expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice.
AB 2571 builds upon California’s longstanding leadership in advancing pharmacists as members of the health care team by aligning payment policy with the clinical services pharmacists are already authorized to provide.
For these reasons, I respectfully urge you to SIGN AB 2571 and help ensure that Californians can benefit more fully from the pharmacists already practicing in their communities and health care systems.
