Core Competencies in Hospital Pharmacy: Essential Department Data

Abstract

The initial installments of the Director's Forum reviewed key core competencies necessary for a pharmacy department to define their value in patient care. Core competencies include medication order review, medication order dispensing, and preparing intravenous (IV) admixtures. The next article will review the final core competency: compliance with regulatory standards. Additional pharmacy department programs such as medication therapy management and patient safety are also critical in establishing a patient-centered focus, and will be discussed in future articles.

Full text

582 Volume 41, June 2006
Director's Forum
Information and data have been
a vital component in under-
standing and managing health
care. These data address health
care management on a national,
regional, and local level. An exam-
ple is Pennsylvania’s Healthcare
Cost Containment Council
(PHC4).1PHC4 is an independent
agency that uses interactive data-
bases to report the costs and qual-
ity of health care in Pennsylvania.
PHC4 publishes information for
the public on costs and outcomes
associated with a variety of disease
states and medical procedures,
including diabetes care, and coro-
nary artery and orthopedic
surgery outcomes. In order to dis-
tinguish problems and issues in
providing health care in a given
area of the Commonwealth, hospi-
tals, patients, and insurers use
data from PHC4. The data from
PHC4 are used in research to
examine the epidemiology of cer-
tain outcomes based on different
variables of the patient population
in Pennsylvania.
Hospitals and health care
organizations depend on data and
information to manage their clini-
cal care and operations. For exam-
ple, hospitals use information and
data to project and track their rev-
enue and expenses and to establish
indicators of quality improvement.
All hospitals have a financial
responsibility to their respective
governance to monitor both costs
and quality, and publish informa-
tion internally and externally.
Importantly, the yearly budgeting
process in hospitals is solely
dependent on information on
financial performance from the
previous year along with projected
expenses for additional programs
for the upcoming budget year.
Every hospital pharmacy
director must have the ability to
analyze and measure all key oper-
ational and clinical activities. In
fact, it is recommended that phar-
macy directors, new in their posi-
tion, place a high priority on data
management and reporting.2
Essential information is responsi-
ble not only to run the daily
patient care service of a pharmacy,
but vital in strategic planning of
patient-centered services.
This article reviews the impor-
tant data that every pharmacy
director must be able to access and
understand to operate an efficient
department and to establish
patient-centered pharmacy ser-
vices. The goal of this article is to
provide hospital pharmacy direc-
tors with a summary and explana-
tion of important financial, opera-
tional, and quality data for their
departments. The specific aims of
this article are to (1) describe the
importance of the pharmacy direc-
tors’ understanding and managing
of departmental data and informa-
tion; (2) describe specific informa-
tion that monitors the financial,
operational, and clinical perfor-
mance of the department; (3) pre-
sent steps that the hospital phar-
macy director can take to obtain
and monitor key departmental
information. Hopefully, the
lessons learned from this article
can be applied to establish a sys-
tem for data collection, manage-
ment, and interpretation in a
patient-centered pharmacy service.
IMPORTANCE OF ESSENTIAL DATA
The pharmacy director is
responsible for the quality of the
medication use process in the
organization. Inherent in that
responsibility is a thorough under-
standing of the operational, clini-
Hospital Pharmacy
Volume 41, Number 6, pp 582–587
2006 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.
Core Competencies in Hospital Pharmacy:
Essential Department Data
Robert J. Weber, MS, FASHP*
*Associate Professor and Department Chair, University of Pittsburgh School of Phar-
macy, Executive Director of Pharmacy, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pitts-
burgh, PA.
The initial installments of the Director’s Forum reviewed key core compe-
tencies necessary for a pharmacy department to define their value in patient
care. Core competencies include medication order review, medication order
dispensing, and preparing intravenous (IV) admixtures. The next article will
review the final core competency: compliance with regulatory standards.
Additional pharmacy department programs such as medication therapy
management and patient safety are also critical in establishing a patient-
centered focus, and will be discussed in future articles.