Informatics Pharmacy – A Data-Centric Pharmacy Model

The domain of informatics pharmacy is interesting because it involves the integration of data, analytics, and application of technology to the field of medicine. Concepts like workflow management, software performance, and others are often the key aspects of informatics pharmacy.

A Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) article mentions that informatics pharmacy deals with data, its interpretation, and its analysis to provide valuable insights for the healthcare service team of a healthcare setting.

One of the biggest achievements in the field of informatics pharmacy is e-prescribing. Online prescriptions reduce the paperwork in a healthcare setting by almost 80%. Administrative staff in the healthcare settings can handle a lot of workload due to the easier and the user-friendly e-prescriptions.

Leading healthcare settings have integrated principles of informatics pharmacy into their work models. This clearly indicates that informatics pharmacy doesn’t really deal with core medicine, as some other pharmacies do. Secondly, while most other pharmacies are actual pharmacy settings, informatics pharmacy is a concept.

Eventually, a team of doctors is responsible for the delivery of an efficient healthcare management system to the patient. Informatics Pharmacy provides all the necessary support by means of data, analysis, and trends. Some of this data could be specific to the management of health conditions. Hospital settings perform these data analysis tasks with the help of intuitive software applications. Thus, integrating information technology to the mainstream working model of the healthcare setting is accomplished.

Informatics pharmacy may only provide the background data to doctors in a healthcare setting, but the application of this model in the healthcare setting is widespread. Not only does it guide the healthcare setting in observing the best healthcare practices, but by integrating information technology and data warehousing principles, healthcare settings ease a lot of the administrative workload.

E-prescription is probably a major achievement that informatics pharmacy has achieved to its credit. And in times to come, this domain of medicine will rise in popularity.

http://www.himss.org/ASP/topics_pharmacyInformatics.asp

http://www.pharmacyinformatics.org/