Abstract
Objectives: It has been reported that supportive personnel, such as pharmacy technicians, are key participants in the use of health information technology. The purpose of this study was to describe how pharmacy technicians use e-prescribing and to explore the characteristics of technicians that support pharmacists in ensuring patient safety. Methods: This was a qualitative study that used observations, interviews, and focus groups to understand the role of pharmacy technicians in e-prescribing. Fourteen pharmacy technicians and 13 pharmacists from five community pharmacies participated. Observations lasted about nine hours in each pharmacy. Follow-up interviews and two separate focus groups were later conducted. Observation field notes and audio recordings were transcribed and thematically analyzed. Results: Pharmacy technicians were primarily responsible for all steps leading up to pharmacist review of the e-prescription and dispensing of medications to the patient. Technician characteristics, including experience, certification status, and knowledge of appropriate medication use, were reported as important factors in supporting a pharmacist’s role in ensuring patient safety with the use of e-prescribing. Conclusion: Study findings indicate that pharmacy technicians have an important role in supporting pharmacists to prevent medication errors. Certain characteristics of pharmacy technicians were identified with the potential to improve the e-prescription medication dispensing process and decrease patient harm through the identification and resolution of errors.
Highlights
Medication errors are a significant problem in healthcare settings [1,2,3]
As e-prescribing becomes more widely used, it is important to examine the role of technicians in ensuring medication safety with this health information technology
Pharmacy technicians in this study reported that they used a variety of strategies to review prescriptions and to ensure that any medication errors were identified and either: (1) resolved if the error was not complicated; or
Summary
Medication errors are a significant problem in healthcare settings [1,2,3]. Medication errors can lead to suboptimal outcomes in patients, including increased cost [3], longer hospitalization [4], injury [5]and death [6]. Medication errors are a significant problem in healthcare settings [1,2,3]. One form of health information technology (health IT) that has been promoted to reduce medication errors in various healthcare settings is electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) [7,8,9]. Eprescribing systems allow physicians to electronically generate and transmit prescriptions to community pharmacies. E-prescribing presents an alternative to more traditional methods of transmitting prescriptions via phone, fax, or paper. E-prescribing system use has seen tremendous growth over the past decade, from 29 million e-prescriptions generated in 2007 to 1.20 billion in 2014 [10]. In community pharmacies that are primarily responsible for processing prescriptions, it is estimated that prescription error rates are as low as 0.23%
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