Development of health-system inpatient pharmacy clinical metrics

PURPOSE: To describe a process to identify metrics that represent the impact of inpatient pharmacy services on patient outcomes across a health system. SUMMARY: The authors describe a systematic process of identifying inpatient clinical outcome measures that could represent pharmacists' impact on patient outcomes and eventually be displayed in a dashboard within the electronic medical record (EMR). A list was generated through literature review, assessment of practices at other sites, evaluation of current pharmacy services, and collaboration with the quality department and System Pharmacy Clinical User Group. The project team narrowed the list through assessment against standardized criteria. An assessment tool was designed and distributed to stakeholders to prioritize clinical outcome measures for inclusion on the dashboard. The clinical outcome measures were transformed into metrics by determining measurement criteria, inclusion and exclusion parameters, and review time frame. After validation, the metrics are planned to be displayed on an inpatient pharmacy EMR dashboard. Exemption from institutional review board review was granted for this project. CONCLUSION: A systematic process was developed and used to identify inpatient clinical outcome metrics.