Benchmarking hospital clinical pharmacy practice using standardised key performance indicators (KPIs).

Area of Science:

• Pharmacy Practice
• Health Services Research
• Medication Safety

Background:

• Hospital pharmacy services are crucial for medication safety and quality use of medicines through clinical activities.
• Standardized key performance indicators (KPIs) enable measurement, monitoring, and benchmarking of pharmacy services.
• KPI standardization facilitates inter- and intra-site comparisons for targeted service improvements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the types and frequency of clinical pharmacy activities in five hospitals.
• To analyze clinical pharmacy activity across inpatient, discharge, outpatient, and dispensary settings.
• To evaluate the utility of standardized KPIs in assessing pharmacy service performance.

Main Methods:

• Data collection of KPIs by pharmacists across five hospitals in Queensland, Australia.
• Utilized a paper-based tool developed through co-design for data collection.
• Collected data over one week across various clinical settings: inpatient, discharge, outpatient, and dispensary.

Main Results:

• High rates of discharge education (82.7%) and reconciliation (88.2%) were observed.
• Pharmacists identified 5,009 drug-related problems (DRPs), with high-risk DRPs constituting almost 20%.
• The rate of DRP identification was highest in outpatient clinics (64.8 per 100 reviews).

Conclusions:

• Reporting and benchmarking clinical pharmacy activity using standardized KPIs identify opportunities for service enhancement.
• Standardized KPIs are valuable tools for monitoring and improving clinical pharmacy services.
• Future research should focus on large-scale studies using routinely recorded data for KPI monitoring.