Implementation of a strategy for identification and monitoring of clinical outcome measures in a department of pharmacy

Abstract

Purpose: To describe a department of pharmacy strategy to identify and monitor outcome measures that represent the impact of clinical pharmacy services on patient outcomes.

Summary: Our department established the Clinical Impact Committee, with the goal of developing and maintaining an approach to demonstrate the impact of clinical pharmacists on patient care outcomes. We describe the committee's structure, aims, and key stakeholders, inclusive of both departmental leadership and clinical pharmacist representatives across service lines. We also describe the systematic process used by the committee for identifying clinical outcome measures that are both aligned with organizational priorities and representative of pharmacists' impact. This involved assembly of a crosswalk of clinical outcome measures that are prioritized by the organization and attributable to the work of clinical pharmacists. We found it imperative to connect pharmacists' efforts to the priorities of the organization to demonstrate value and continue to justify pharmacy resources. Once the crosswalk of clinical outcome measures was assembled, the Clinical Impact Committee leveraged modified Delphi methodology to build consensus on the measures to prioritize. Once determined, the final outcome measures were developed into outcomes dashboards, to be monitored by the committee and leveraged by frontline pharmacists.

Conclusion: Our organization was successful in developing a structure, the Clinical Impact Committee, to identify, prioritize, and monitor measures that demonstrate pharmacist contributions to patient care outcomes. Further, our approach includes an intentional alignment with organizational priorities, allowing us to understand and communicate the contributions of our teams to meeting-defined organizational quality priorities.

Keywords: clinical pharmacy; health-system pharmacy; outcome measures; pharmacy practice; quality measures; value-based care.