Rural pharmacies found 10,000 at-risk patients in six months. The harder question is who manages them next.
Twenty-five rural pharmacies screened their own patients for six months and identified nearly 10,000 people at risk of stroke or heart disease.
That is the first-phase result of a pilot run by the NCPA Innovation Center, CPESN Community Health, and Bristol Myers Squibb across Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri, the six states known as the Stroke Belt. Those 25 pharmacies logged more than 11,000 patient encounters and more than 20,000 interventions. Pharmacy staff detected an abnormal heart rhythm in 400 patients and referred 81 percent of them to a physician. Fifteen percent of those patients had no primary care physician, so the pharmacy team found them one.
Read those numbers as an owner. Nobody built a clinic. The screenings happened at the counter, in the counseling window, and by phone with patients the staff knew by name.
Finding the patient is the easy part
A stroke risk score is a snapshot. Hypertension and diabetes are managed daily, at home, in the weeks between provider visits. The pilot proved a rural pharmacy team can find the patient. It also sharpens the harder question. Once you have flagged someone with uncontrolled blood pressure and no doctor within reach, who is watching them next week?
Patients already answer the phone for their pharmacist
Independent pharmacies already have something healthcare technology cannot manufacture: trusted relationships with their patients. The pilot worked because of that trust. A patient who stops for a screening on med sync day will also take a reading at home when their pharmacist asks for one.
PACT turns a screening into continuous care
PACT (Pharmacy Activated Chronic Care through Trust) is a physician-supervised, pharmacist-delivered care model for managing chronic disease between provider visits. Physicians at IndyCare Medical, the independent medical group affiliated with our platform, assess each patient and build the care plan. The pharmacy team delivers day-to-day care under that physician’s supervision, using the relationship it already has with the patient. The patient keeps their existing PCP, who receives monthly clinical charts directly in their EHR.
Monitoring and care management tools, including remote patient monitoring and chronic care management, are selected patient by patient based on medical necessity. They are instruments inside the model, not the model.
Judge the model by the patient’s numbers
Patients in PACT have seen 11 to 15 mmHg reductions in systolic blood pressure and 1.0 to 1.6% reductions in A1C.
The Stroke Belt pilot showed what a pharmacy team can find in six months. PACT is built for what happens after the screening: the months of daily management that decide whether that patient ends up in a hospital or stays home. Truentity Health provides the technology, clinical infrastructure, and operational support that make that possible, with clinical oversight from an affiliated medical group.
Source: National Community Pharmacists Association news release, August 11, 2026, as reported by Drug Store News.