Designing digital documents to support medication management

Dr. Jean-Pierre Calabretto is a pharmacist, with over 25 years of experience in hospital practice at the Women’s in Children’s Hospital (WCH). For 20 of those years, he was the Associate Director of Pharmacy. His experience spans all areas of hospital pharmacy including management, clinical practice and quality management with a focus on information systems and information management, including involvement in hospital, State and Federal committees on Health-related IT. He held a dual WCH-University of South Australia (UniSA) position as Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy Informatics in 2000-2003. He undertook fulltime PhD studies at the School of Computer and Information Sciences at UniSA from 2004 to 2007: ‘Supporting Medication-related decision-making with information model-based digital documents’. Currently, he is a lecturer at the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences (UniSA); and has an appointment with the Australian Medicines Handbook related to supporting development of electronic drug information content.

Paula Swatman
University of South Australia

Professor Paula Swatman is Chair of Information Systems at the University of South Australia and has worked in ICT and, in particular, e-Commerce for 25 years. She recently completed a limited-term appointment as the State Records of SA/Fuji Xerox/State Library of SA Chair of Business Information Management, leading a multidisciplinary and cross-institutional team s in designing a suite of leading-edge graduate teaching programs to link the hitherto separate areas of IM / library studies / records and archival management / ICT / business – and will now be spearheading research and academic leadership into the Digital Economy. Between 2001-2003 she held the Chair of eBusiness at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, where she was foundation Director of the Institute for Management and initiated the multi-disciplinary, Bologna degrees of Bachelor/Master of Science in Information Management – and where she remains an Emeritus Professor. Before moving to Germany, she was Foundation Professor and Innovation Leader in e-Commerce at RMIT University (Melbourne) and Director of RMIT's Interactive Information Institute.

Designing digital documents to support medication management

Jean-Pierre Calabretto, Paula Swatman

Abstract

The lack of electronic decision support is an emerging issue for pharmacists in Australia involved in medication reviews. A digital document approach allows a flexible means of communicating and sharing medication-related information through a simple, easy-to-use artefact. This document-centric approach is also a comfortable fit with health professionals’ existing practice, and suggests practice improvements in safety, quality and efficiency of the medication management process. Our research has also identified factors which influence how decision support tools should be modelled and implemented - missing information, using conversation for information exchange, the effect of information granularity on model development, the ‘perspective’ of practice tools; and the level of technology use. Our research approach advocates that an essential information model provides a complement to specialist knowledge and contextual decision-making by pharmacists and doctors – providing ‘systems for experts’, rather than expert systems – and may offer an effective way forward using ‘lightweight’ technology.

Keywords

Digital Documents; Medication Management; Information Models; Decision Support

Full Text: PDF

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

--- eJHI - electronic Journal of Health Informatics - ISSN 1446-4381 ---

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