Community pharmacies interact with patients constantly. Dispensing medications is more than a one way process. Many medications require monitoring of lab results, drug interaction checks, gauging patient symptoms and wellness factors.While pharmacy information systems provide valuable means to manage medication dispensing, they are an island in terms of the bigger patient picture as they do not contain patient information from other healthcare providers.

Background

In the Auckland and Northland region, over 3 million patient records are stored in the Care Connect Test Safe database which has evolved over the last decade. The database is the Sysmex Eclair clinical data repository (CDR).The Eclair CDR includes laboratory, radiology and other diagnostic results, discharge summaries, eReferrals, clinical letters, medications and other patient documentation drawn from DHB facilities and community laboratories across the region¹. Since 2011, dispensing records from community pharmacies have been added to the Test Safe database and nearly 400 community pharmacies across the regions end dispensing data to TestSafe². There are now over 118 million individual dispensing records in the system³. Community pharmacists have secure access to Test Safe so they can see what medications a patient has already been dispensed from other pharmacies in the region,as well as access relevant lab test results and hospital discharge summaries (including hospital medication lists) as needed for patient management.

1 Testsafe

2 Regional_CDR_Case_Study_V3_Web1

3 Susan Hedges, healthAlliance; 2016 Sysmex User Group presentation, “The Northern Region’s Eclair CDR Experience – TestSafe Customer Case Study”