A quest to objectively measure quality
This week we launched a first-of-its-kind (to our knowledge) dashboard in a community pharmacy. We know saving patients money is important, but there is so much more to pharmacy care than affordability. Namely, quality.
However, it is hard to objectively state quality. Patients can feel it when we know their name or answer their calls quickly; but quality extends into our ability to assess therapy for efficacy and safety…and act on our findings.
I polled the team to come up with ideas for how we might track quality. Our intern, Jaylin Tuttle, suggested we make a white board tracker. That afternoon, we were live! Within a few hours, we recorded a major dose too high — intervening on a patient that had been taking 6400mg of OTC ibuprofen a day! (more than double the max dose — his kidneys will thank us)
My obsession with data and tracking is nothing new. As far back as pharmacy school, I started experimenting with ways to track pharmacist care. Pitt (my alma mater) had a tracking tool, the Pitt Form, which was encouraged/required for tracking all interventions throughout the curriculum. It was great, aside from the fact that it needed to be faxed. Fax wasn’t good enough in my mind — heck, I could spin up a quick Google Form that would accomplish the same goal that afternoon. And that’s what I did!
I presented it to the School and got their support to pilot on a larger scale. Before long, all Pitt Forms were submitted electronically. Unfortunately, aside from semester reports, the data was basically sent into the void. It wasn’t super accessible to the students; and many students just viewed it as a check-the-box assignment. Inspired, I turned the data into useable reports and leaderboards. After all, what’s a better way to inspire growth/improvement than competition (yes, that is my future wife as #2 in the Class of 2014…and no, I never made it on the leaderboard. I claim its because I was too busy making the leaderboard)
I inserted random Easter eggs too to make completing the forms rewarding and fun.
Graduation was approaching and the utility and access to Pitt’s Pitt Form was about to close out. I teamed up with a friend to make a super convenient app tracker. We didn’t make it to product launch, although I am quite proud of the logo (below).
With the launch of this white board dashboard inside of Blueberry Pharmacy, we finally have a way to track the data itch that’s been nagging me since pharmacy school. I’m not sure how we will ultimately use these data, but the first step is collecting ✅. A few fun ideas have come to our minds; but I’m curious if yinz have any ideas. Hit us up if you do!
Some rules of our dashboard:
- Only tallying resolved problems/accepted recommendations
- Must categorize into the 7 accepted problem types
- Refer to them as “optimizations” when patient-facing…positive spin and not accusatory to providers
- Have fun — celebrate team when we identify and intervene!
