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Comprehensive Case Study Assignment

Gagandeep Singh (23049446)

Healthcare Leadership, Sault College

HCA118: Innovation in Health Care

Instructor’s Name – Mohamed Eissa

March 26, 2024

Integration of Digital Health Technologies in Pharmacy Practice

The world is moving by storm and the enthusiasm for technology is rising every day. The

landscape of health care is taking and keeping its shape by following up with the trend towards

the integration of digital health technologies in pharmacy practice. There still have been some

pharmacies that face difficulties in executing and using these digital technologies to work on

understanding patient care and upgrade pharmacy operations. Indications of this issue includes

restricted understandability of digital health tools, limitations in medication management

processes. Hence, in this time of pharmacy practice and training, educational programs must

promote the improvement of capabilities for the mental, conscious, and powerful utilization of

computerized devices. This requires the preparation of disruptive instructors, who are equipped

for utilizing their teaching learning capabilities adjusted to the digital environment and the

process should be appropriate for animating the utilization of effective technologies (Pharm,

2022).

To provide digital health technologies into pharmacy practice to upgrade and enhance

patient care is expected as the anticipated result. This includes utilizing digital tools for

medication checking, medicine synchronization programs, and patient training programs. All the

pharmacists, patients, pharmacy software vendors, healthcare providers, regulatory agencies, and

insurance providers are all involved in this change management.

Frequent monitoring is required to measure the progress of digital technology integration

on pharmacy staff and patients to check whether there is any scope of improvement in

medication, reduction in errors, enhancements in patient satisfaction. These measures are

essential to get necessary data for better improvisations in future outcomes.

Regardless of the pharmacy's efforts to modernize activities, there are challenges in tackling the

capability of digital health technologies to upgrade patient consideration and pharmacy services.

The challenges that are faced by the pharmacies are:

 Technological barriers: The pharmacy staff as well as the patients are not used to the new

technology and can face multiple problems/challenges while using these tools. Every

innovation requires time to understand and that is the case with this hence, the technological

barrier occurs, and they get limited access in getting proficiency utilizing that.

 Workflow Integration: Back in time, manual receipts were being given to the patients who

came to the pharmacies but when the era of computerization came, the pharmacy staff finds it

very difficult to use it. Similarly, these digital tools are not easy to integrate in the current

workflow as they are used to the legacy methodologies.

 Patient Acceptance: While some patients adopted the change, many others are hesitant to

adopt it due to many reasons which can be their privacy concerns, issues with data

governance, security, or technological literacy (Current challenges and potential solutions to

the use of digital health technologies in evidence generation: a narrative review, 2023).

The challenges can be addressed with solutions to improve the utilization of health tools.

Some possible solutions are as mentioned:

 Training and Education: A brief and detailed training should be provided to the pharmacy

staff on every aspect of the digitalization of the system like tools, software, management

tools and services and for the patients, there should be educational guidelines so that they can

understand all the aspects on how to access their personal records and medical history.
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 Workflow Optimization: The entire protocol and structure of workflow must be re-structured

and re-designed using new digital technologies such as new application software systems,

digital guidelines, graphical user interface interactive system for the patient as well as the

pharmacy staff to enhance communication between patient and pharmacists.

 Patient Engagement Strategies: Awareness for the education of the patients should be

encouraged to let the patients know about the benefit of having a digital system which can be

used to interact with them regarding their concerns and to resolve their issues.

Change tool applied – ADKAR Change Management Model:

ADKAR stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. This model

can be used to achieve change in any organization (The Prosci ADKAR model, 2023). Let’s take

these 5 elements of the change management model and apply them with our scenario to know

how it can be used to achieve change in pharmacy field.

 Awareness: We can use this element to create awareness amongst the pharmacy staff

regarding the need of new digital technology related to health and how it can be beneficial

for the pharmacy practice.

 Desire: We can promote a desire amongst pharmacy staff team by giving them proper

information regarding the entire system such as tools and technologies, software systems,

about how they work, what benefits they can get from it to make them interested in

integrating the digital technology in pharmacy practice.

 Knowledge: This element can help by providing training and education to the patients as well

as the pharmacists. With the knowledge, the pharmacists can be equipped with all the

required to run a proper system and can easily do their regular work in digital systems. While

patients can also be reliable on this system by retrieving their records and getting their
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personal data saved in a secure digital vault. With knowledge and skills, they can access it

without any limitation and accessibility requirement from anyone.

 Ability: This element comes when the pharmacists and patients get the knowledge so that

they can get the ability to ensure that they have all the resources such as knowledge of digital

tools, software systems, infrastructures, frameworks that are needed to ensure the successful

implementation and integration of digital health technology in pharmacy practice.

 Reinforcement: This element is specially for maintaining the change. In this, the pharmacy

team can get recognitions and rewards for their efforts in the workplace. We can celebrate

each milestone they achieve to keep them motivated and encourage them so that they can

keep doing the work as they should in pharmacy practice (Matern, 2022).
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Bibliography

Pharm, C. I. (2022, April 5). Digital pharmacists: the new wave in pharmacy practice and

education. Retrieved from National Library of Medicine:

[Link]

%20the%20use,and%20big%20data%20%5B26%E2%80%9329

Current challenges and potential solutions to the use of digital health technologies in evidence

generation: a narrative review. (2023, September 28). Retrieved from National Library of

Medicine: [Link]

%20include%20lack%20of%20evidence,others%20(12%2C%2014).

The Prosci ADKAR model. (2023, July 5). Retrieved from Prosci:

[Link]

Matern, L. V. (2022, November 17). How to take the ADKAR model from theory to practice.

Retrieved from Howspace: [Link]

from-theory-to-practice/