title: Assessment of Pharmacy Information System Performance in Three Hospitals in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia.
abstract: The pharmacy information system is one of the central pillars of a hospital information system. This research evaluated a pharmacy information system according to six aspects of the medication process in three hospitals in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. System administrators were interviewed to determine availability of functionalities. Then, system users within the hospital were targeted to evaluate their level of usage of these functionalities. The study was cross-sectional. Two structured surveys were designed. The overall response rate of hospital users was 31.7 percent. In all three hospitals studied, the electronic health record is hybrid, implementation has been completed and the system is running, and the systems have computerized provider order entry and clinical decision support. Also, the pharmacy information systems are integrated with the electronic health record, and computerized provider order entry and almost all prescribing and transcription functionalities are available; however, drug dispensing is a mostly manual process. However, the study hospitals do not use barcode-assisted medication administration systems to verify patient identity and electronically check dose administration, and none of them have computerized adverse drug event monitoring that uses the electronic health record. The numbers of users who used different functionalities most or all of the time was generally low. The highest frequency of utilization was for patient administration records (56.8 percent), and the lowest was for linkage of the pharmacy information system to pharmacy stock (9.1 percent). Encouraging users to use different functionalities was highly recommended.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Information Management and Technology in the College of Public Health and Health Informatics at the University of Dammam in Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Azza
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: El Mahalli
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Electronics and Control Engineering in Faculty of Electronic Engineering at Menoufia University in Egypt.
authors.forename: Sahar H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: El-Khafif
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Information Management and Technology in the College of Public Health and Health Informatics at the University of Dammam in Saudi Arabia.
authors.forename: Wid
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Yamani
mesh_terms: D016303:Clinical Pharmacy Information Systems / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D006751:Hospital Information Systems / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D050316:Medical Order Entry Systems; D012529:Saudi Arabia
keywords: hospital users; pharmacy information system; system administrators; usage