Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine

“Students asked, why haven’t we used this before now?”

PHARMACY  •  IPE  •  INFORMATICS

Course description:
This course will introduce students to the specific role of clinical informatics in patient safety and health outcomes with an emphasis on pharmacy-driven medication use processes in health systems. Students will develop the introductory knowledge and skills to assume responsibility for identifying, accessing, retrieving, creating and exchanging relevant patient and health information to ensure safe and effective patient care throughout the medication use process. Attention is given to the roles and responsibilities of pharmacy informatics in information technology and automation to improve accessibility of information from practice advancement and interprofessional perspective relative to medical and nursing informatics. This course may incorporate lectures, reading assignments, participatory discussions, homework assignments and student presentations to enhance understanding.

Instructor:
Kimberly Barefield, PharmD

“Many of the students have never been in the hospital. They need to learn: What is informatics, what is the pharmacist’s role, what is an EHR.”

IMPLEMENTATION

In 2018, Kimberly Barefield, PharmD, began using Go in the Health Information Retrieval and Informatics course to show students the functionality of an electronic health record (EHR). She incorporated Go into the Health Informatics elective in 2019, using patient cases from the Go catalog for reference, and started using queries in the course in 2020.

For Health Informatics, she uses the Basic and Advanced Query orientation and has found that students are able to pick up the query activities quickly with little onboarding trouble. Go’s interface allows students to understand and visualize how to begin writing rules in order to perform specific searches.

“The more you engage them, the more active they are and they learn better. EHR Go can help them think through drug interactions and allergies more critically, which they’ll need to do when they are working as a pharmacist.“

Go is used twice over the course of the term in Barefield’s Healthcare Informatics. It is also a requirement for the Medication Safety and Queries classes and will be implemented in the Formulary Management elective in 2021, to highlight MTM services. Overall, Go is used by 200 P2s and P3s at PCOM.

“They enjoy the hands-on so much more than a paper case.”