Spreeha Choudhury, Associate in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Newark office, authored “Supporting Pharmacists to Provide Contraceptive Care,” in Health Affairs. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
Maria W. Steenland and colleagues (November 2025) offer a valuable national picture of pharmacists' limited participation in contraceptive prescribing, despite the growing number of states that authorize it. Their findings highlight a critical point for policy makers.
Expanding pharmacists' scope of practice is necessary, but it is only the first step.
Without addressing the underlying structural barriers inside pharmacies, meaningful gains in contraceptive access will be hard to achieve. Pharmacists are a highly educated and underused clinical workforce. They are trained to provide medication counseling, preventive services, and patient assessment.
Yet the study's finding that most prescribing pharmacists wrote fewer than ten prescriptions in 2022 reflects long-standing operational constraints rather than a lack of interest or ability. In most retail settings, pharmacists are the only clinicians on duty. Despite this, pharmacists have no protected time for clinical services.
Reimbursement is central to this problem. When counseling services are unpaid or inconsistently covered, pharmacists have little capacity to devote meaningful time to them. The study notes that pharmacist-prescribed contraception skews toward privately insured patients, a pattern consistent with the absence of clear and stable payment pathways for counseling among Medicaid programs and some private plans.
The strain grows when pharmacists are evaluating a patient for a completely new prescription. Initiating contraceptive care takes more time and judgment than filling a prescription written on the basis of a physician's prior assessment. Pharmacists can certainly do this work, but they are being expected to do it without the staffing, exam space, scheduling infrastructure, or reliable reimbursement that physicians rely on.
Policy makers hoping to unlock the full potential of pharmacist prescribing should pair scope expansions with sustainable reimbursement and operational support that allow pharmacists to practice at the top of their license.
