How to strengthen your team’s role as a trusted clinical advisor

How to strengthen your team’s role as a trusted clinical advisor

Every day you and your team are focused on your highest goal: guiding the best possible treatment for every patient you encounter to help them reach their desired outcomes.

Achieving this requires coordinating your efforts with members of an interdisciplinary care team and it means making confident drug decisions in the face of statistics that document nearly 700,000 emergency department visits and 100,000 hospitalizations yearly due to adverse drug events.

As pharmacists become increasingly embedded in quality improvement, research, readmission reduction, and other specialized programs, you need to know that your staff can perform these duties with certainty and accuracy.

Pharmacists often feel compelled to double-check their information sources, which can drain their valuable time, cloud their thinking, and delay their decisions.

As personalized medicine and specialty medications become mainstream, pharmacists must quickly get up to speed on their unique requirements to optimize results for their patients. Yet, with so much information available in so many sources, it can be tough to know what’s correct and current. And that can lead to answers that may be incomplete or conflicting.

The risk

You need to be sure that your pharmacists can address important drug safety considerations–especially those associated with specialty medications, such as frequent dosing adjustments or patient training that may be required. Without accurate information, you could steer the care team in a direction that leads to undesirable outcomes.

You could also open the door to adverse drug events and their associated higher costs and decreased patient satisfaction.

Avoiding these risks requires a new approach.

Rather than searching for information across multiple sources, your team needs a single source of relevant, evidence-based content to provide informed drug guidance–and address both clinician and patient questions.

But to be confident in your team’s guidance–and their ability to act as trusted advisors–you must first overcome important challenges:

• Protecting against preventable adverse drug events
• Difficulty participating in advanced clinical roles

Challenge: Protecting against preventable adverse drug events

Medicine today is more dynamic than ever. Scientific breakthroughs, rising patient expectations, and complicated medical conditions breed increasingly challenging questions. You and your team need to consider a diverse blend of factors to make safe and effective drug decisions. You need trusted and timely information that allows you to weigh the available options, understand potential risks, and offer treatment guidance that’s right for your patient’s unique circumstance.

If your pharmacists feel compelled to check multiple references to confirm their decisions, they could waste valuable time and delay the delivery of critical guidance. On the other hand, relying on unproven or inconsistent information can lead to decisions that risk preventable adverse drug events–opening the door to longer hospital stays, higher readmission rates, and increased costs.

Solution: Guide optimal therapy for every patient

It’s crucial for your team to have access to the rich, timely, trusted content they need to help protect against adverse drug events and confidently guide therapies for every patient. Your team can trust Clinical Pharmacology powered by ClinicalKey to help with this. With it, your pharmacists will be enabled to guide safe, effective therapy for patients by accessing in-depth drug information that’s updated continuously by specialized PharmD experts. Drug safety alerts and clinical updates are published every hour, every day (including weekends and holidays). Having this information puts pharmacists in a better position to make appropriate, defensible treatment decisions that can reduce preventable adverse events and drive optimal outcomes.

Challenge: Difficulty participating in advanced clinical roles

You and your team are under tremendous pressure to provide medication advice that’s thorough, complete, and reflects the latest knowledge. And as your pharmacists have taken on advanced clinical roles–and are participating in interdisciplinary care–their day-to-day now includes responsibilities like analyzing how patient populations are responding to new medications or using pharmacogenomics to tailor drug therapies.

Given this expanded role, along with the need to coordinate and collaborate with a larger team, the information your pharmacists turn to for answers must be worthy of their trust and time. It’s inefficient to scour and compare results from multiple resources just to be sure. Yet, an answer that’s not fully vetted or takes too long to deliver doesn’t just harm your pharmacy team’s reputation, it can weaken the entire care team by negatively impacting treatment plans.

Solution: Be a trusted clinical advisor

As your team’s role grows more advanced and collaborative, their ability to contribute positively to the broader care team relies on the data guiding their decisions. With access to complete, current, and actionable information, your pharmacists can be viewed as integral, trusted advisors to the care team. Clinical Pharmacology powered by ClinicalKey provides the actionable information your pharmacists need to be integral, trusted advisors to the broader healthcare team. With a continuous stream of curated relevant clinical content, they’ll uncover insights that help them make swift, confident treatment recommendations.

Learn more about how your pharmacists can benefit from Clinical Pharmacology powered by ClinicalKey.