Ulfat Usta Shanouha
American University of Beirut Medical Center, Lebanon
Title: SharePoint development and implementation in a tertiary care center in Lebanon
Biography
Biography: Ulfat Usta Shanouha
Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the experience of developing and implementing a pharmacy SharePoint as a single resource point to ensure effective and user-friendly communication and documentation of clinical interventions in a tertiary care center.
Background: The American University of Beirut Medical Center is a 350-bed capacity tertiary care teaching hospital in Lebanon. The pharmacy operates 24/7 with a Comprehensive Unit-based model where the pharmacists are assigned to adults, pediatrics, oncology, operation and night shift teams. This new structure led to increased challenges in communicating information within the department; communications was mainly through emails, multiple steps to reach references, and manual documentation to capture and track clinical activities (e.g. clinical rounds, chart documentation, time spent at the unit, follow up on restricted antimicrobial use and multidisciplinary meetings).
Methods: The configuration of the pharmacy home page and the content was agreed upon with the IT department and the pharmacists’ team leaders. The home page includes links to frequently utilized external (e.g. Micromedex, Medscape, out-patients’ formulary for third party-payers) and internal information (e.g. policies and procedures, order sets and protocols). Within the clinical services area are charts, standardized drip protocols, guidelines, stability sheets, compounding instructions and formulary applications include scheduling, calendar to reserve annual vacation, and parenteral nutrition software. Likewise, announcement section with temporary links was added to the home page to draw attention to important but transient information, such as an announcement for drugs in shortage, availability of newly approved drugs. Hierarchy of restriction was set with different access levels as owners, members and visitors and an alert setting was customized to provide e-mail alerts when information is updated or added. Quick launch buttons to document clinical activities and place follow up note on the inpatients’ dashboard using a scroll down option was created with the ability to generate reports to compile and analyze the data which is currently under development to be accessible through ipads and smart phones. The major future challenge is to persuade the pharmacist to make use of it. Future development will include training material and annual competency programs for pharmacists and technicians.
Results: After site initiation and training were completed, staff pharmacists found that SharePoint an improved method of document storage and communication. Survey to get staff feed-back is planned after full implementation.
Conclusion: Pharmacy SharePoint offers many applications to improve communication and achieve real-time capture of meaningful benchmarking data, but staff adoption and utilization of this resource will be the keys to success.