Hospital pharmacists more involved in patient care, survey finds

Hospital pharmacists are becoming more involved in patient care and are embracing new technology, a new study found.

"Pharmacists continue to assume greater responsibility for writing medication orders, dosing, ordering laboratory tests and monitoring outcomes," according to the authors of the study by American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). "Health-system pharmacists are taking a leading role in addressing the opioid crisis, advancing safety in compounded sterile preparations through adoption of intravenous workflow technologies and optimizing EHR applications to leverage clinical decision support tools to improve the safe prescribing and use of medications."

For the study, the group surveyed 5,000 U.S. hospital before the COVID-19 pandemic. The results are published in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy.

More hospitals reported rationing medications, the survey found. The percentage of hospitals rationing medications was 31%, up from 25% in 2016, the survey found. Cost of therapy was one of the reasons cited for rationing.

There was also an increase in the number of hospitals with a limited strict formulary and tight restrictions on non-formulary medication use. Those numbers have increased from 63% in 2016 to 73% in the most recent survey.

The number of hospitals with active opioid stewardship programs has increased to 47% from 41% in 2018. Those programs include patient educational initiatives, limits to the supply of opioids for home-discharge prescriptions and a prescription drug monitoring database.

“The good news is that if a hospital has an opioid stewardship program, which nearly half do, pharmacists are almost always involved,” Philip J. Schneider, co-author of the survey and a professor in the College of Pharmacy at The Ohio State University, said, according to ASHP.

There continues to be an increase in the number of full-time pharmacist positions at hospitals, with the number reaching 19.2 for each 100 occupied beds, the study found. Also, there was a low vacancy rate for pharmacists positions with less than 3% of jobs open.