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Pharmacy Careers
Automation can enhance safety and efficiency and allow staff to concentrate on higher-value tasks as direct patient care roles expand.
Pharmacists play an important role in the ever-changing health care landscape. With an increasing emphasis on building multidisciplinary care teams, pharmacists are seeing an expanded role in direct patient care through programs such as opioid stewardship and post-discharge counseling. On the operational side, overseeing the medication use process—arguably one of the largest line items in a hospital—offers an opportunity for strategic decision-making and potential contributions to financial success.
Technology, Health Care, Automation, Pharmacy, Student | Image Credit: © Production Perig | stock.adobe.com
As the health care ecosystem moves toward becoming increasingly automated and digitized, pharmacy industry leaders have coalesced around the vision of the autonomous pharmacy, which seeks to replace manual, error-prone activities with automated processes that are safer and more efficient.1 Adoption of technology and intelligence in the medication use process allows pharmacy staff to focus on higher-value tasks, improving clinician satisfaction and patient outcomes.
Training the next generation of pharmacy leaders to embrace innovative technologies is crucial for the future of pharmacy and advancing the autonomous pharmacy vision, leading to improved patient safety amid a national health care staffing shortage. Providing pharmacy students with early exposure and access to the evolving aspects of pharmacy technology also provides a competitive advantage as they transition to the workplace. Future pharmacy leaders are uniquely positioned to help advance the practice of pharmacy and improve outcomes.
OFFERING HANDS-ON EXPOSURE TO PHARMACY AUTOMATION
At Long Island University, we launched a Center for Innovative Medication Management (CIMM) laboratory in collaboration with Omnicell. In this facility, which is the first of its kind in the country, students gain firsthand experience with innovative robotics, smart devices, and intelligent software designed to support various functions within medication management, such as central pharmacy dispensing, sterile compounding robotics, point-of-care medication dispensing systems, and advanced software that delivers intelligence to drive medication inventory optimization. As these technologies are commonplace in real-world clinical environments, exposing students while still in pharmacy school better prepares them to enter the workforce.
Future pharmacy leaders are uniquely positioned to help advance the practice of pharmacy and improve outcomes.
EMBRACING INNOVATION TO IMPROVE SAFETY AND PATIENT CARE
Beyond operational benefits, this training program provides students with an understanding of how the technology is integrated into patient care and how it can minimize the likelihood of human error and increase the overall efficiency of pharmacies.2 Offering pharmacy students early exposure to these platforms empowers them to quickly adopt these technologies in clinical settings.
According to ECRI, primary patient safety concerns are directly attributed to staffing shortages of pharmacists, physicians, medical or laboratory technicians, nursing assistants, and other clinicians.2 In the face of a growing pharmacist shortage, medication management tools can often act as a valuable safeguard for clinical teams, helping ensure the “5 rights” of medication administration—the right patient, the right drug, the right time, the right dose, and the right route—which are generally regarded as a standard for safe medication practices. By understanding how these tools can help advance patient safety and care, new pharmacy graduates are poised to immediately bring value to clinical care sites.
Although having an adequately staffed team of health care professionals is imperative to effectively monitor patients and respond to their needs in real time, technology can help fill in gaps. The earlier pharmacy students are taught how to think strategically about technology, the more quickly they’ll be able to deploy and leverage these tools in the real world.
Arash Dabestani, PharmD, MHA, FASHP, FABC, is the dean and a professor at Long Island University College of Pharmacy in Brooklyn, New York. Dabestani has more than 25 years of experience as a health system pharmacy executive as well as a practicing pharmacist in community, hospital, home infusion, and specialty pharmacy.
ARMING PHARMACY LEADERS OF TOMORROW TO TACKLE CHALLENGES ON FRONT LINES
By bringing together academia and industry, the CIMM lab at Long Island University provides pharmacy students with hands-on experience with pharmacy robots, advanced software that delivers intelligence, analytics to drive medication inventory optimization, and more with the goal of eliminating medication errors altogether and achieving 100% regulatory compliance and data visibility.
Pharmacy students of today and leaders of tomorrow can empower their teams to focus on higher-value tasks that directly impact clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. Training well-rounded pharmacists to lead these changes in the pharmacy technology revolution is imperative as the industry continues to evolve.
