The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy is a professional association of individual pharmacists who use the tools and techniques of managed care in the practice of pharmacy. At the heart of every member is commitment to a simple goal: Provision of the best available pharmaceutical care for patients.

As an organization, the Academy strives to achieve its mission of empowering its members to serve society by providing opportunities for continued professional growth, by advancing individual and collective knowledge. Throughout the year, AMCP provides conferences, online learning access, peer-reviewed literature and leadership development seminars. Each is designed with the goal of advancing professional knowledge, improving the design and delivery of pharmacy benefits, and ultimately, patient satisfaction and health outcomes.

Patients who receive the correct drug in the correct way achieve better outcomes, improving quality of life, the bedrock of our Vision. Equally important to prescribing the right drug, however, is being able to provide adequate access to as many patients as possible. The Academy has been doggedly pursuing strategies to help providers of drug coverage achieve that goal as well, by working in ground-breaking disciplines such as pharmacoeconomics, a branch of pharmacy that seeks to determine the true value of a drug-not product cost, but effectiveness in improving overall health outcomes of patient populations.

The focus of the Academy has been to create scientifically designed methodologies for making medical choices as intelligently as current knowledge will allow, supported by evidence-based clinical studies. Two of the Academy's most successful products to date are AMCP's Format for Formulary Submissions and Pharmacy's Framework for Drug Therapy Management in the 21st Century. The Format is a standardized methodology for assessing drugs scientifically, based on the value they provide. Widely adopted by numerous health plans, governmental agencies such as the Department of Defense and leading pharmacy benefit management companies, in the three years since its inception the Format has become a de facto industry standard. Managed care organizations employing the Format cover approximately half of all pharmacy care beneficiaries. Its use is growing daily.

Pharmacy's Framework is a much broader initiative. It is essentially a self-assessment tool that can be employed to provide any size health care organization or practitioner with a template for continuous quality improvement. By using Pharmacy's Framework, any practitioner, from a community pharmacist to a large managed care organization, can extract the templates and tools to improve pharmacy practice and patient outcomes. We encourage you to explore both of these products on other areas of our website.

We invite you to join us if you are a practicing pharmacist, or explore our website and learn more about what we do. The publications and products on our website are freely available all whose objective it is to advance human knowledge and the practice of managed care pharmacy.