An article on the Baxter web site at www.baxter.com discusses how healthcare informatics can improve pharmacy operations, help reduce errors, and move pharmacists closer to patients’ care. The hospital pharmacy is a central player within the system providing medications and helping to ensure that safe and effective medication therapy is a key component of each patient’s care.
With the use of more technology, pharmacists now have more flexibility to move beyond the walls of the pharmacy. This is made possible by new technologies, such as automated compounders, IV robotics, automated dispensing cabinets, and workflow management software to help acquire, store, analyze, use, and disseminate medications.
Pharmacists in many hospitals are using a combination of health science, chemical science, and information science or informatics that begins in the pharmacy. More and more pharmacists are able to bring their expertise directly to the hospital floor and to the patient’s bedside while working in conjunction with physicians and nurses to coordinate patient treatment plans.
For example, the “DoseEdge Pharmacy Workflow Manager” help to automate and track the medication process from preparation through dispensing while providing important documentation for the entire process. To date, the system has identified more than one million potential medication errors.
“Informatics allows pharmacists to automate record-keeping tasks, releases the pharmacists’ time to do more patient-centered functions,” says Dennis Tribble PharmD, pharmacy informatics expert and Medical Director at Baxter.