2025 Southeastern Residency Conference

Title: Empowering Pharmacy Practice through Data Democratization
 
Authors: Benjamin G. Edouard, Sydney Kchao, Alyssa Billmeyer


Background: Data democratization is the process of making data accessible, comprehensible, and functional within all members of an organization. This study aims to identify and assess data utilization and the quality of data democratization within pharmaceutical services. Historically, data access and reports have been consolidated to a team of analytic specialists. However, pharmacists today may need critical information but may face challenges in finding the best way to access the right resources or information. The implementation of analytics within the healthcare setting has grown exponentially as technology evolves, but pharmacy practice still has an opportunity to grow. This study plans to test this concept within a hospital system to gauge how pharmacists stand to benefit from sifting through data more efficiently when the tools are more easily accessible. The value to the organization’s front-line pharmacists will be the empowerment to make robust and impactful clinical decisions that are data-driven. When pharmacists have more access to the right data, it could result in more ideas, innovations, creative interventions, and more informed therapeutic management. 
 
Methods: The study design focused on pre-post surveys to assess the impact on pharmacists’ daily activities. The source of participants were the Emory University Hospital Midtown’s clinical pharmacists as a nonrandomized control group. Staff was contacted through email with the pre-surveys attached. Clinical pharmacy specialists who work within the inpatient, oncology, or ambulatory care areas of Emory Healthcare and who have an identified need for the use of data within their work area were the inclusion criteria set in the study. Once all of the pre-surveys are collected, they will be analyzed to implement training sessions for the clinical pharmacy specialists on using SlicerDicer and other data analytics tools to obtain information that may be useful to them to make daily interventions. For the study’s primary outcome, clinical pharmacists participating in the survey were sent a pre-intervention survey to measure baseline use of data and how it impacts their clinical decisions, and it will be contrasted with a post-intervention survey. The post-intervention survey reassesses the pharmacist’s views on the tools and accessibility of data needs. Secondary outcomes will include reporting analytics used by pharmacists to assess changes in practice, such as the number of reports and average duration of access. These outcomes will help assess changes in attitudes, perceptions, behavior, practices, barriers, and challenges around data access that could benefit pharmacy practice. The surveys are being collected from Microsoft Forms, and then the results will be measured using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Data collection will also be sourced from Epic Systems at Emory University Hospital Midtown. SlicerDicer software is also within Epic; reports will be gathered from there specifically. Statistical analysis methods will include tests for reliability and validity among the surveys. 
 
Results: Preliminary survey results included 17 responses from EUHM clinical pharmacists. The clinical areas represented in the pre-survey included, but were not limited to, cardiac critical care, hepatology, and oncology. When asked to identify specific data elements that could be reported to them and how these elements would support their daily tasks, 16 out of 17 participants identified gaps in data accessibility. Nearly 60% of the requested data access types aligned with Reporting Workbench functionality, while approximately 30% of the desired data elements corresponded with SlicerDicer capabilities. Additional results are pending and will further clarify pharmacists’ data accessibility needs and whether the staff felt the intervention helped their workflow. 


Conclusions: In Progress