ASHP updates best practices guidance for pharmacists

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) offers updated guidance for pharmacists with the release of the ASHP Best Practices 2015-2016 book.

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This annual publication includes 28 new policy positions, five revised statements and guidelines, and two new guidelines about pharmacist involvement in HIV care and the design of database-driven clinical decision support (CDS).

Two new guidelines

The guideline for pharmacist involvement in HIV care provides innovative ways for pharmacists to aid patient care within an interdisciplinary team. In addition, the guideline covers specific aspects of HIV prevention, care, and treatment and how pharmacists can establish new roles to meet the challenges of the HIV epidemic.

The guideline for the design of database-driven CDS offers solutions to reduce alert fatigue in databases and electronic health records and increase user satisfaction and effectiveness of the CDS systems. This guideline also suggests the need for collaboration among vendors of health information systems and drug databases as well as the end-users for the development and testing of new algorithms for pharmacotherapy warnings.

The updated publication also includes revised ASHP statements on the roles and responsibilities of pharmacy executives; the pharmacist’s role in substance abuse, prevention, education, and assistance; and the pharmacist’s role in clinical informatics. The revised ASHP guidelines cover the outsourcing of sterile compounding services and the minimum standard for ambulatory care pharmacy practice.

All the guidance documents are available for free online. The ASHP Best Practices 2015-2016 book can be purchased at the ASHP online store.