Re-engineering pharmaceutical care: towards a patient-focused care approach

As healthcare reform takes shape, many challenges face hospital pharmacists. An opportunity exists to combine the principles of patient-focused care and pharmaceutical care to redesign the role of pharmacy. To achieve this objective, pharmacy departments should adopt business concepts such as process re-engineering. Process re-engineering is a change management tool which aims to produce dramatic improvement in performance measures by re-designing the process. The goal of restructuring is to increase the amount of time pharmacists spend providing pharmaceutical care to patients. The pharmaceutical care concept is a method of delivering pharmaceutical care services that match individual patient needs with the services provided. This article describes many hospital pharmacy department transitions to a patient focused care environment by adopting the patient focused care concept and the process re-engineering to improve the quality of patient care through systems improvement.