S M Powers | PubMed Health

PubMed1993

How to assemble a patient-centered pharmacy QI program.

The QI program is patient driven. The question "How does this monitoring affect the patient?" is central to decisions on designing indicators. Time spent on the various levels of quality assessment in the Pharmacy QI Committee is proportional to patient impact. Personnel time devoted to concurrent review of dosing and drug interaction overrides, drug information response accuracy, and therapeutic drug monitoring reflects the importance the Pharmacy Department places on maintaining a drug therapy safety net. The patient is central to the pharmacy QI program. The spirit of the Joint Commission's standards is met; acceptable documentation completes the requirements.

Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems↗

PubMed1993

Interventions: a quality assessment tool for the pharmacy department and the medical staff.

The intervention tracking system at Texas Children's Hospital has evolved from a simple log to a pocket book of check-off forms requiring minimal writing. Information gathered from the intervention data has progressed from merely notification that a call was made to tracking numbers and types of interventions to including the pharmacists in the information loop. Pharmacists are assured that the time spent documenting interventions provides data for medical staff QI, pharmacy QI, and feedback to themselves as well. No documentation is wasted; no separate data collection is required. Intervention categories with medical staff-approved indicators are treated as a concurrent DUE. Depending on the rate of acceptance of pharmacists' recommendations, physicians, pharmacists, or both are targeted for education. Analysis of the acceptance rate may also indicate the need for systems changes more profoundly affecting one or the other of the groups.

Child↗