Documenting clinical pharmacist intervention before and after the introduction of a web-based tool

Objectives To develop a database for documenting pharmacist intervention through a web-based application. The secondary endpoint was to determine if the new, web-based application provides any benefits with regards to documentation compliance by clinical pharmacists and ease of calculating cost savings compared with our previous method of documenting pharmacist interventions. Setting A tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia. Method The documentation of interventions using a web-based documentation application was retrospectively compared with previous methods of documentation of clinical pharmacists' interventions (multi-user PC software). Main outcome measure The number and types of interventions recorded by pharmacists, data mining of archived data, efficiency, cost savings, and the accuracy of the data generated. Results The number of documented clinical interventions increased from 4,926, using the multi-user PC software, to 6,840 for the web-based application. On average, we observed 653 interventions per clinical pharmacist using the web-based application, which showed an increase compared to an average of 493 interventions using the old multi-user PC software. However, using a paired Student's t-test there was no statistical significance difference between the two means (P = 0.201). Using a chi(2) test, which captured management level and the type of system used, we found a strong effect of management level (P < 2.2 x 10(-16)) on the number of documented interventions. We also found a moderately significant relationship between educational level and the number of interventions documented (P = 0.045). The mean +/- SD time required to document an intervention using the web-based application was 66.55 +/- 8.98 s. Using the web-based application, 29.06% of documented interventions resulted in cost-savings, while using the multi-user PC software only 4.75% of interventions did so. The majority of cost savings across both platforms resulted from the discontinuation of unnecessary drugs and a change in dosage regimen. Data collection using the web-based application was consistently more complete when compared to the multi-user PC software. Conclusions The web-based application is an efficient system for documenting pharmacist interventions. Its flexibility and accessibility, as well as its detailed report functionality is a useful tool that will hopefully encourage other primary and secondary care facilities to adopt similar applications.