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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Don MacDonald, MSc¹, Kayla Collins, MSc¹, and Doreen B. Neville, ScD². (1) Centre for Health Information, Research and Development Division, 1 Crosbie Place, St. John's, NF A1B 3Y8, Canada, 709-757-2408, donm@nlchi.nl.ca, (2) Faculty of Medicine, e-Health Research Unit, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NF A1B 3V6, Canada

The development of highly sophisticated Electronic Health Record (EHR) initiatives is rapidly occurring across Canada with little uniformity in their design, implementation or evaluation. These systems are expensive and impact many facets of health care. A common framework for evaluation is needed to assess the benefits of the systems and support knowledge transfer across jurisdictions. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is at the forefront of EHR initiatives in Canada. The province's latest initiative is the development of a person-specific comprehensive pharmacy network that will be accessible to authorized health care providers at the point of care. This system is vital to improving the effective and efficient use of health care resources and will enable health care providers to make better informed and timely decisions as well as provide Government and other organizations with aggregate information for policy development and research which will lead to improved population health. The implementation will take place over three phases: 1) linkage of all community pharmacies together; 2) integration of hospital pharmacy systems with the network; and 3) enabling interactive functionality for physicians and other appropriate health care providers. The framework for the evaluation of the pharmacy network has two sets of objectives, the first related to accountability and the second related to performance enhancement. Accountability objectives will seek to describe and measure the health system benefits arising from the implementation of the pharmacy network with particular focus on reduced emergency room visits as a result of an adverse drug event (adult and pediatric), optimizing seniors drug utilization, and reducing illegal use of prescription medications. Performance enhancement objectives include the identification and description of the key facilitators and barriers to successful implementation of the pharmacy network and the documentation of lessons learned from implementing the pharmacy network. The proposed evaluation framework provides a structured approach for measuring the benefits of the pharmacy network and can be used as a template for the design and conduct of evaluation studies to assess EHR initiatives in Canada and in other countries. The framework has seven (7) steps that lead researchers and key stakeholders through the design and implementation of an evaluation study. This session will provide a detailed description of how these steps will be used in the evaluation of the pharmacy network and will inform participants how the steps can be applied to the evaluation of other Electronic Health Record initiatives.

Learning Objectives:

• Following this session, participants will be able to recognize the need for an evaluation framework for evaluating electronic health record initiatives and identify the seven steps in the design and implementation of an evaluation study.

Related Web page: www.nlchi.nl.ca/research_evaluations.asp

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation