Personal digital assistants for documenting primary care clinical pharmacy services in a health maintenance organization

As pharmacy practice continues to evolve, the need for data that demonstrate the value of clinical pharmacy services increases in importance. However, data collection via traditional manual documentation is time-consuming, cumbersome, and often inconsistent. A standardized electronic documentation system facilitates the data collection, compilation, and analysis required to assess the value of clinical pharmacy staff in a primary care setting. The successful implementation and utility of computerized systems for documenting pharmacists’ clinical interventions and activities in the inpatient setting have been described.1,–8 However, to the authors’ knowledge, there are no reports in the peer-reviewed literature describing documentation systems (electronic or otherwise) for pharmacists’ activities in the ambulatory care environment. At Kaiser Permanente of Colorado (KPCO), the primary care clinical pharmacy service (PCCPS) consists of approximately 28 full-time clinical pharmacy staff members located in 18 medical offices throughout the Denver–Boulder metropolitan area. PCCPS staff partner with other members of the KPCO health care team (e.g., physicians, midlevel practitioners, nurses) to optimize medication management and improve individual- and population-based patient outcomes in a cost-effective manner. Describing the widespread activities of PCCPS is very difficult because there is no one database where its activities are collectively recorded.