Problem Statement
PhIS fills the gap for a PIS within Hospital Selayang and is currently used extensively for supplying medications in the inpatient and outpatient pharmacy settings.
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In the inpatient pharmacy setting:
1) Pharmacists will receive prescriber’s handwritten prescriptions
2) Screened for complete identification of patients, dose, frequency, duration, drug-drug interactions, polypharmacy, inappropriate drug therapy, contraindications, patient’s drug allergies, and so on.
3) For any prescribing errors detected, pharmacists will then have to contact the prescribers for further clarification.
4) After the prescriptions have been thoroughly screened, medications will be filled and then supplied to the wards.
5) Then pharmacists will have to transcribe the prescriptions into the PhIS and record the medications supplied to the wards into PhIS in a retrospective manner.
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In the outpatient pharmacy setting:
1) Prescriptions are printed out by the clinic and will be handed over to pharmacists by patients. These print-out prescriptions are in a place of the manual handwritten prescriptions received in the inpatient pharmacy
2) The following steps that follow are similar to inpatient pharmacy patients.
A good IS should....
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"Enable the hospital to move towards concurrent review for optimization of patient care"
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Aniza et al., (2010)
As there is not an ideal integration between prescribers and the pharmacy department, redundancy of work causes transcription of prescription into PhIS as a rather retrospective process.
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Difficult for optimization of pharmaceutical care for patients as pharmacists will be rather focused on the administrative part and supplying medications to the patients.
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The lack of integration of PhIS with the Cerner HIS in Hospital Selayang also results in ineffective communication and lacking synergy between the prescribers and the pharmacy department.
As pharmacists transcribe the prescription into PhIS, errors may occur when registering patients resulting in different identifiers of patients as registered into Cerner HIS as well as PhIS. When patient identifiers are incorrect or different, this may lead to medication errors which may pose serious harm to patients.
The aim is to study on the lack of integration and its redundancy of PhIS and propose a new HIS technologies to tackle these problems