Knowledge, Skills, and Resources for Pharmacy Informatics Education

The most recent issue of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education featured a Technology in Pharmacy Education section.  There is some really interesting reading in this section including, “Use of Twitter to Encourage Interaction in a Multi-campus Pharmacy Management Course” by @Brent_Fox.  Brent actually authored several articles including, “Knowledge, Skills, and Resources for Pharmacy Informatics Education“, which he wrote along with the newly installed Chair of the ASHP Informatics Section Allen Flynn, informatics luminary and frontliner Chris Fortier (@FortiPharm), and I.  With this article, we tried to summarize the baseline informatics knowledge that pharmacy students should possess upon graduation, framed within med use processes.  My hope is that it will be of real practical use to educators and others as specific recommendations are provided regarding activities and resources for class and curricular integration, rather than just observations made from 30,000 feet.  Also, as with all articles in AJPE, this one is open access (OA) in that it can be accessed free, full-text by anyone.

@kevinclauson

Source: Fox BI, Flynn AJ, Fortier CR, Clauson KA. Knowledge, skills, and resources for pharmacy informatics education. Am J Pharm Educ. 2011;75(5):Article 93.

Consumer Health Informatics Course – TYVM Guest Lecturers

Last semester I taught Consumer Health Informatics and Web 2.0 in Healthcare in the College of Pharmacy (COP) after having coordinated several iterations of it in the MS in Biomedical Informatics Program. At the end of the COP course, I asked the students for their opinions about the most useful and least useful lectures of the semester (with an eye towards improving future offerings). Many of the students mentioned topics that were discussed by one of the six excellent guest lecturers. While I sincerely appreciate each guest lecturer’s contribution, I thought it would be even more meaningful to share a student response about each guest lecturer/topic.

I’ll use the format below to do so (lecturers appear in the order they taught during the semester):

Student quote
Guest Lecturer
Affiliation
“Lecture Topic”

The course’s most useful lecture was Dr. Kang’s since it focused on policy and the big picture instead of just one or two tools.
Jeah-Ah Kang, PharmD
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising, and Communications (DDMAC)
“Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools”

Most useful was Dr. Gualtieri’s because it may be the only one that really looked at things from the patient’s side.
Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM
Tufts University School of Medicine
“Blogging for Health: Communicating the Experience of Illness”

Most useful lecture was Dr. Dyer’s lecture. It was very cool seeing how healthcare was using this new tech and getting positive results. Very. Cool.
Jennifer Dyer, MD, MPH
Ohio State University, College of Medicine
“RU TAKING UR MEDS? (DR. SEZ TEXTING TEENZ HELPS!)”

I would like to see more experts like Dr. Fahrni. His lecture was most useful. It provided insight on what this breed of pharmacist does on a daily basis.
Jerry Fahrni, PharmD
Kaweah Delta District Hospital (now Talyst)
“Pharmacy Informatics – One Pharmacist’s Perspective”

The most useful topic was Dr. Mesko’s on virtual worlds because it was most forward looking. I wish we would use it more and create our own avatars.
Bertalan Mesko, MD
University of Debrecen Medical School
“Medicine in Second Life, the virtual world”

The most useful lecture topic would have to be the final lecture from Dr. Fox, it was extremely informative and I enjoyed it a lot. I’d like to see an additional lecture from him.
Brent Fox, PharmD, PhD
University of Auburn, College of Pharmacy
“The Pharmacist’s Role in Health 2.0”

 

Social media presence for the course contributors can be found here:

Lisa Gualtieri, PhD, ScM (@lisagualtieri)

Jennifer Dyer, MD, MPH (@EndoGoddess)

Jerry Fahrni, PharmD (@JFahrni)

Bertalan Mesko, MD (@Berci)

Brent Fox, PharmD, PhD (@Brent_Fox)

 

@kevinclauson

Soapbox 2.0: Use of blogs by pharmacists

I saw a tweet by John @Poikonen that alerted me to the fact that a second article in as many weeks has been published on pharmacy and blogs.  Two pharmacy students (Justin Elkins and Chilla Goncz) and I authored “Use of blogs by pharmacists“, which appears in the new issue of the American Journal of Health System Pharmacy.  We identified all blogs that were pharmacist-authored, active (i.e. posts in the last 3 months), and written in English.  Blogs focused on pharmacy, but not written by a pharmacist were excluded.  Forty-four blogs were identified that fit those criteria.  We used the most recent 5 posts to assess the blogs based on six categories (e.g. practice based topics, identifying information, positive language, critical language, professionalism and miscellaneous). 

Most pharmacist blogs (68%) were written anonymously (versus 43% in Lagu’s study of physician and nurse blogs).  Pharmacist bloggers were equally represented by community (43%) and non-community settings (43%); the practice settings of the remainder were indeterminable.  These blogs most commonly used positive language to describe the profession (32%), other health care professionals (25%), and patients (25%).  Critical language was more commonly observed in descriptions of patients (57%); almost half of all posts contained profane or explicit language (48%). 

Most of the blogs (71%) contained mentions of pharmacologic therapies and current healthcare events (66%).  We also noted that 25% of these bloggers had a Twitter account (relative to 11% of the general population in the same timeframe per Pew).  Out of the 11 pharmacist blogs that were ranked by Technorati, all but two were primarily of a ‘ranting’ nature (e.g. Angry Pharmacist, Angriest Pharmacist, Your Pharmacist May Hate You).  Interestingly, the only two ranked, but non-ranting blogs were written by non-US pharmacists. 

Our full AJHP article lists all of the 44 blogs and while it is not open access, my hope is that via ASHP Connect and rapid response that this list of pharmacist blogs can be updated and curated using our article as a starting point.   

@kevinclauson

Analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs

We’ve seen analyses of blogs by physicians & nurses [1], medical bloggers [2], etc.  However, the excellent article “Analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs: Types, discourse themes, and issues” by Jeff Cain (@jjcain00) is the first analysis of pharmacy-centric blogs.  It appears in the the new issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association and presents a balanced view of the pharmacy blogosphere.  It found that social media promotes transparency (except for authorship).  It also recognized that the degree of disinhibiton in the Web 2.0 world may have contributed to a substantial number of these blogs containing negative content about patients, pharmacy, and other healthcare professionals.  Cain and Dillon categorized 136 pharmacy-related blogs into: news, personal views, student oriented, career focused, etc.  Blog posts were also scored as positive (e.g. demonstrating empathy, supplying helpful drug information), negative (e.g. complaints, foul language), or neutral.  Cain and Dillon asserted that despite three of the top four blog themes being negative, these blogs likely had no real impact on the public perception of pharmacy as their readership “likely does not extend beyond the personal acquaintances of the bloggers and others in the profession”.  Overall, they found a variety of blog types with a preponderance of negative and derogatory posts.  Some primarily positive ones were identified as well.  The authors suggested the personal view blogs may be best used to educate student pharmacists and the profession about issues they will face.

@kevinclauson

[1] Lagu T, Kaufman EJ, Asch DA, Armstrong K. Content of weblogs written by health professionals. J Gen Intern Med 2008;23(10):1642-6.
[2] Kovic I, Lulic I, Brumini G. Examining the medical blogosphere: an online survey of medical bloggers. J Med Internet Res 2008;10(3):e28.