Support for pharmacists in the patient care journey
Nearly 80% of patients see pharmacists as a key component of their healthcare team (Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. 2022). Yet, pharmacy leaders are coping with many challenges including:
- Flat or shrinking budgets
- Staffing shortages
- Drug supply issues that impact formulary management and patient care
- Limited ability to buy and use effective technology solutions in the workflow
These barriers come clashing with what pharmacists encounter every day in their practice.
Common barriers pharmacists face daily
- Information overload, characterized by the onslaught of new research and guidelines that can be confusing, inconsistent, or inapplicable.
- Workflow inefficiencies, such as too many irrelevant drug alerts or the lags and disconnects between systems (like delays in adapting to new formulary requirements, for example).
- Incomplete or ineffective integrations of decision and data systems, such as lack of interoperability or standardization or missing patient-specific parameters.
“In many cases they [pharmacists] are the final or nearly the final step before a human, a patient, is going to take a drug, so they’re instrumental in making sure that patients receive drugs alone or in combination that are both safe and effective,” says Peter Bonis, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Wolters Kluwer, Health.
Pharmacy leaders must seek solutions that empower pharmacists to operate at the top of their license and to align decisions with the entire care team. These solutions should also help healthcare organizations realize measurable workflow efficiencies.
In order to improve health outcomes while meeting these challenges head-on, leaders must focus on:
1. Providing clarity in the evidence
As pharmacists become more heavily involved in patient care, the need for access to evidence-based clinical information also increases – especially at the point of care. Unfortunately, the industry is saturated with existing resources to help with dosing and drug interactions, and they can often be outdated, cumbersome, and time-consuming to search through.
You need to understand the information-seeking behaviors of your pharmacists and assess the solutions based on depth and breadth of content and tools as they relate to patient care. Evidence-based drug content and tools should answer most of the information challenges that pharmacists face.
2. Aligning clinicians across the continuum of care
Harmful care variations and clinician miscommunication can occur when your organization isn’t united on one platform and speaking with one cohesive voice. One way to help align care teams is to provide them with the same evidence-based, clinically actionable information so they can choose appropriate and safe drugs, dosing, and administration routes for each patient based on the best available evidence and their specific information. Here, it is essential to compare the evidence-based solutions that are used across your care teams and to analyze topic areas that are important to your organization.
3. Increasing efficiency through integration and accessibility
There are many levels of integration and interoperability, and organizations should strive to get the most out of their electronic medical records (EMRs) and other information systems. A smart integration can provide clinicians with the recommended dosages for a specific population, like newborns, children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with obesity. It can also help conduct effective medication screening with timely actionable alerts to clinical team members about medication errors or interactions.
Therapy is at the center of medicine, and now is the time to empower your pharmacists to fully engage and align with the entire care team. Read this eBook how to enable efficiency and increase productivity while helping your clinicians better adhere to compliance standards and regulatory guidelines.