Clinical pharmacy software

Felkey BG, Fox BI. 2003b. Computer software for clinical pharmacy services. In DiPiro J (ed), Encyclopedia of Clinical Pharmacy, p. 214. New York Marcel Dekker. 

Strategic and tactical consideration for how the pharmacy software solution matches up with the clinical information systems, Internet solutions, health resource planning, access management, decision support, home care, managed care, and infrastructure applications. 

Orthopedics has recognized the importance of measuring outcomes in terms of quality-adjusted life-years instead of length of implant survival.Similarly, pharmacy must implement software documentation solutions that facilitate outcomes monitoring beyond cost savings. Software is needed with the ability to calculate, in a cost-benefit analysis, the clinical impact of pharmacist interventions as they affect therapeutic, financial, and humanistic outcomes. The current array of products could be better integrated into documentation software to facilitate tabulation of these data. With the power of the Internet to manipulate data in a dynamic database, it would even be possible for hospitals to compare their outcomes on a local, regional, or national basis. Furthermore, the database could... 

In clinical applications, the best recommendation for testing available applications would be to use a case-based methodology. We recommend that five or six complicated cases, which would represent a cross section of the patient population served by the pharmacy, be used to test the application. In this way, the clinician will see how the application performs throughout an entire care process and avoid the power path demonstration. In this information age, selecting clinical software is an extremely important task. The explosion of capabilities offered by the Internet can make the selection process both exciting and confusing. A careful analysis of options will usually be rewarded by better results, but wary buyers need to prepare themselves to revisit the marketplace more frequently than they might have in the past to identify innovative alternatives. 

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