Pharmacy sets up intranet site with answers, links
June 1, 2008 5 minutes read
Pharmacy sets up intranet site with answers, links
Popular forms available on-line
A hospital's drug information call center fielded numerous phone calls about finding forms and regulatory or accreditation requirements. While the call center experts were happy to help out it took up a lot of time they could have been spending on more vital questions about medications.
So a pharmacy resident at the Stanford Hospital and Clinics Drug Information Service in Stanford, CA, came up with a solution: Develop an intranet site for the drug information service.
"I wanted to make things more accessible," says Emily C. Costerison, PharmD, an associate medical communications scientist with Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco, CA. Costerison had been working as a resident in the drug information center of a major hospital when she developed the intranet site.
"The thinking in the medical world is that we have all of these resources so do we really need a drug information center," Costerison says. "But, although we have these resources, it's hard to find things."
The drug information center has a call center to which physicians and nurses commonly called to ask how they might obtain a particular form or how they should use a database, she recalls.
"The forms weren't available on-line at that time," Costerison says. "They were available on our server, and pharmacists could access and print out the forms for themselves and physicians."
Physicians frequently requested the pharmacy and therapeutics form in which they could make a request that a new drug be added to the hospital's formulary, she says.
Also, nurses and physicians often asked to see the drug shortage list, which is updated each week, she adds.
Costerison decided to develop an intranet site with pharmacy information and updates and links to requested forms.
"We had a web team and already had Intranet available," Costerison says. "The web team gave me some examples to follow, and I developed a plan of how I wanted the Intranet site to look and what kind of information I wanted on it."
The Intranet site is accessible only by Stanford hospital and clinic personnel.
"Our main focus at Stanford was to provide service to our own health care providers," she says.
Costerison analyzed five months of the phone calls coming into the drug information center and identified trends, such as those that were repetitive and could easily be answered on a web site.
"We categorized each question," Costerison says. "So if you had a question on dosing, it'd be categorized as 'dosing'; an adverse event question would be categorized as 'adverse event'; if someone needed a form or had a question that was not a true drug information question, we categorized it as 'other.'"
Since the Intranet site has been on-line, there have been fewer calls to the drug information center that are categorized as "other," which may mean that people are finding their answers on the Intranet site, Costerison notes.
Since some calls requested information about where additional information could be found, Costerison created a table, containing questions and answers, for the Intranet site.
"I put together a table so that if you had a question about an adverse event it would provide you with the databases you'd need," she says.
The links include the Stanford University library databases and others, she notes.
"I did a rotation in the Stanford library, and we set up a portal just for the pharmacy where they could click on the portal/web page with its databases," Costerison says. "These are the free databases that would be the most helpful, giving professionals assistance when they narrow down where to go for information."
For dosing questions, Costerison created questions and answers for those that were simple and that a medical professional could answer on his or her own.
The Intranet site's links include the drug shortage list, two pharmacy and therapeutics forms for adding or deleting a drug from the pharmacy, forms for pharmacists about restricted drugs, and patient criteria standards.
"We have an "Ask the Pharmacist" page where they can e-mail a question and have a 24-hour turnaround time," Costerison says. "They can give their phone number in case it's an urgent question."
The frequently-asked-questions page includes these topics:
- How do I get to the database?
- Who do I contact if I need to order a certain drug?
"The main thing is we wanted to make sure the Intranet site is really easy to maintain," Costerison says. "We didn't want to put a lot of clinical information on the web site because it changes so frequently, so we put in the process information of how do I get this and who do I contact?"
After working on the Intranet site for four months, Costerison was ready to market the new resource.
She developed a brochure and had the marketing department review it.
The brochure describes the Intranet site and the drug information center's services.
"I have a couple of presentations about the Intranet site, trying to focus on places where we didn't have clinical pharmacists," Costerison says.
For example, Costerison visited a dermatology clinic that doesn't have a staff pharmacist, but whose clinicians might need access to forms that are available on the new Intranet site.
Also, Costerison told clinicians in places like the dermatology clinic that the drug information center has a staff pharmacist who is available to help them with any medication issues or questions.
"I went to a lunch meeting with physicians to discuss the Intranet site," Costerison adds. "And all of our pharmacy residents were told about the site, and they started using it and sharing it."
Although the main marketing efforts were directed toward the clinics, there was a little marketing to other hospital clinicians, she notes.
For example, the Intranet site and drug information center's services were featured in a monthly newsletter, and the hospital system's webmasters sent out e-mail notices.
"We didn't want to start out too big and have the drug information center overwhelmed with phone calls," Costerison says. "So we did a little advertising and watched how it was going and then re-evaluated it to see if we could do more."
They also tracked the hits on the Intranet site and found that from February 2007, when the main marketing campaign began, to a month into the campaign, the Intranet site's hits went from 107 hits to 398 hits, Costerison says.
"After the advertising, it went back down to about 100 hits per month," she adds. "We tell people about the Intranet site, and they visit it, but if you don't constantly remind them they stop visiting it as regularly."
A hospital's drug information call center fielded numerous phone calls about finding forms and regulatory or accreditation requirements. While the call center experts were happy to help out it took up a lot of time they could have been spending on more vital questions about medications.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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