Telepharmacy reduces rural critical access hospital medication errors

Cheryl Clark gives a very informative summary of the national telepharmacy report that the Telepharmacy Blog previously posted about, in HealthLeaders Media's newly published article, Can Telepharmacy Reduce Rural Critical Access Drug Mistakes? Yes:

A pharmacist service might be shared among hospitals in the same healthcare system, or in different healthcare systems. Or hospitals may join together to contract for telepharmacy services with a commercial telepharmacy company.

Several studies have concluded that such strategies can greatly improve medication safety in rural hospitals. Nationally, there is a growing shortage of pharmacists, but nowhere is that supply as lopsided as it is in remote parts of the country.

Telepharmacy helps resolve the challenge of getting pharmacists to review orders on an as-needed urgent basis when they otherwise would have to drive 45 miles across rugged mountain roads to get to the hospital.

Later, the summary highlights a unique application of remote pharmacy practice by Envision Telepharmacy from the report:

Having a pharmacist provide long-distance supervision of pharmacy technicians at a rural hospital has not been allowed, except through a pilot project run by a commercial company, Envision Telepharmacy.

Envision provides remote order review and entry, after-hours medication provision, electronic supervision of pharmacy techs and after-hours drug information and consultation.

However, the report said, "It was to recruit hospitals into the Envision telepharmacy pilot. Many hospitals had been operating in violation of state board of pharmacy regulations, but were not being cited. For some hospitals, it was a case of not wanting to solve a problem until it became one."

Quite a few reports, as well as the ISMP recently, have been commenting on the benefits of telepharmacy for a lot of rural communities. The research that this summary came from will most likely be used to shape the Obama administration's rural health policy, as it was funded by the Office of Rural Health Policy under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.