KANNAPOLIS — For the past year-and-a-half, the Cannon Pharmacy’s South Cannon Boulevard location in Kannapolis has provided a remote diabetes and blood pressure monitoring program that the pharmacists say provides the people in the program with more intensive and educated healthcare. Now that the program is showing results, the program is expanding to other Cannon locations in Salisbury and Mooresville.

Sona Tailor, the clinical pharmacist who oversees the program, said that one of the main benefits of the program is that the data is sent to the patient’s doctor and is packaged in with the pharmacist’s notes and patient goals, such as to drink more water or quit smoking and barriers, such as inability to exercise or often forgetting to take medication.

“We’re working collaboratively with their doctor to fill some of these gaps in care. Oftentimes there’s this gap between when they go to the doctor and they’re prescribed their medicine and when they come here and pick it up. There’s no kind of communication with us and the doctor like we taught the patient how to use their insulin or the patient has been experiencing these side effects. These are things I find out not just by talking to them, but because I also have the pharmacy software,” said Tailor.

The largest aspect of the program that Tailor touted was the remote blood pressure and diabetes monitoring devices. Cannon provides patients with a special glucometer or blood pressure monitor, which then automatically connects to the pharmacy and uploads the readings through its own cellular connection, so the patients do not have to connect their devices to their phones or the internet or manually upload the readings themselves.

The readings are then uploaded to the pharmacy’s program, which tracks the data so that doctors, pharmacists and the patients can see any trends or spikes that are happening.

“It gives me a nice graph so I can kind of see any trends and fluctuations in their blood sugar. I get alerts if their blood pressure or blood sugar is too high or low, so everyday when I come in that’s the first thing I do is go through all my alerts. If it’s something out of the ordinary for that patient, I can contact them or contact their doctor,” said Tailor.

Remote patient monitoring is completely covered by both Medicare and North Carolina Medicaid, said Tailor, so long as patients follow one requirement and provide 16 days of readings per month. She said that if she notices a patient falling behind on the checks, she can contact them directly with reminders.

“I tell patients that I recommend checking it every day just to get into the routine of doing it. Most of them are good about doing it at least once a day, if not multiple times a day,” said Tailor.

As part of the program, patients also have direct access to Tailor through text or phone calls to ask about any questions that they may have.

“If they have questions like, ‘Why was my blood pressure 90 over 50 today?’ I’ll talk to them about it and give them counseling on ways to manage it. I also provide counseling to them if they have questions about food, like, ‘Is this bagel going to be good for me to eat?’ No, probably not, but if you want to eat a bagel I would recommend a fourth of a bagel, as that’s what one serving of a bagel is for a diabetic. I get questions like that a lot,” said Tailor.

She also said that sometimes doctors don’t have the time to get into many of the granular details about the patient’s conditions, such as exactly what range their blood pressure should be within at the morning reading, how best to lower their sodium intake or options for people who have disabilities that prevent them from walking for exercise.

“When I meet with them, that gives me the opportunity to come to their level and figure out what their knowledge level is on the condition. Do they know what carbs are? Do they know what protein is? Then, whenever they call me, I’ll pull up their notes to get an idea of where they’re at and I can meet them where they’re at and help them and counsel them,” said Tailor.

Currently, Tailor has approximately 215 patients enrolled in her remote monitoring program at the South Cannon Boulevard location of Cannon Pharmacy. She said that the results during the year and a half she has run the program have been positive, including less hospitalizations of patients for high or low blood sugar levels and significant reductions in many patients’ blood pressure levels.

“When I look at the blood pressure average when they first started the program compared to now, most of them are seeing crazy improvements because now these patients can feel like they’re more in control of their health because they’re seeing their blood pressures. They get excited, ‘My blood pressure was in the 160s a few weeks ago and now I’m in the 130s or 140s.’ Because they’re seeing it every day they get excited and they feel like they can better manage and better control it. We have lots of outcome data to show the improvements in these patients,” said Tailor.

Tailor said that they began the program through their partnership with IndyCare, which provides urgent care and more health services and has an office inside of the South Cannon Boulevard location. That partnership provided them with a pre-existing system that can bill Medicare and Medicaid for medical benefits, which is what the program falls under, instead of prescription benefits. As the pharmacy, founded in Kannapolis in 2002, struggled with decreasing reimbursements for those prescriptions, it looked towards other programs that it could provide that insurance would cover.

“There’s times where we’re filling medicine for patients and we’re losing money, as that drug costs us $10, the patient’s copay is $3 and the insurance is reimbursing us $5. So now we’re only getting paid $8 for a medicine that costs us $10. How can we survive? We can’t. So that’s why we’re finding new innovative ways to make money and at the same time help patients,” said Tailor.

The main Cannon Pharmacy location, located at 1706 S. Cannon Blvd., is where Tailor is located and where the program began.

Tailor said that the Salisbury location, on 1401 Jake Alexander Blvd. S., had recently begun the process to implement the program and should have their own iteration up and running soon. The Mooresville location and other Kannapolis location, at 1402 N. Cannon Blvd., have also begun the process of implementing the program. Anyone interested in joining the program or learning more about it can call their local Cannon Pharmacy and ask about it, said Tailor.