Recently,the provision of pharmaceutical care by clinical pharmacists has been growing in importance.Although they perform diverse roles in wards,hospital pharmacists spend a lot of time in collecting patient information and preparing pharmaceutical care records.In Gifu University Hospital,an electronic medical records system was introduced in June 2004.At the time,we developed a pharmaceutical care support system which was compatible with this system by modifying a commercial pharmaceutical care services system.Our system facilitates the exchange of data between the pharmacy information system and the electronic medical records system.
To evaluate the effectiveness of our system,we compared the time required for confirmation of physicians' consent on pharmaceutical care services,collection of patient history information,preparation of pharmaceutical care service records,and searching for past records with previous times.We found that the system achieved considerable time savings in the provision of pharmaceutical care services and concluded that our system was potentially useful as a tool to support the work of clinical pharmacists.
