IHE Pharmacy (PHARM) addresses information sharing, workflow and patient care in both community and hospital pharmacies.
The Pharmacy domain, begun in 2009, is sponsored by the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists (EAHP), the Dutch National IT Institute for Healthcare (NICTIZ) and Phast.
Together, they are responsible for development and publication of the IHE Pharmacy Technical Framework.
IHE PHARM Profiles
IHE Pharmacy has published the following profile supplements for trial implementation:
- Common Parts Document
- Community Dispense (DIS)
- Community Medication Administration (CMA)
- Community Medication List (PML)
- Community Medication Prescription and Dispense (CMPD
- Community Medication Treatment Plan (MTP)
- Community Pharmaceutical Advice (PADV)
- Community Prescription (PRE)
- Hospital Medication Workflow (HMW)
These documents are available for downloading on the IHE Technical Frameworks main page. Brief descriptions of the profiles are available here.
Strategic Priorities
The Pharmacy domain currently plans work in the following areas:
- Improve information exchange between healthcare providers and organizations that depend on pharmacy-related workflows and processes
- Develop ways to automate collaborative workflow between physicians and pharmacists in both community and hospital pharmacy environment
- Promote widespread adoption and implementation of IHE PHARM profiles in Europe, North America, Asia and worldwide
- Liaison with the European Union epSOS project
- The dominant themes for the next few years will involve work around community pharmacy workflows, hospital pharmacy workflows, medication documentation and hospital supply chain.
Educational Materials
The Pharmacy (PHARM) Planning Committee has published a series of slide presentations for use by all parties interested in interoperability, community and hospital pharmacies and medication information management. The goal of the material is to connect the dots between the problem and the solution defined by PHARM profiles. It is geared to an audience which is familiar with healthcare interoperability problems in general but is not familiar with the way IHE addresses problems or the specific profiles provided by PHARM.
Committees
The Pharmacy Planning and Technical committees are combined. The committee develops and maintains the Pharmacy Technical Framework.
Detailed committee responsibilities include:
Planning Committee
- Developing and reviewing Integration Profile proposals
- Determining scope of development priorities
- Communication and coordination of development activities with other IHE domain
Technical Committee
- Assessing the feasibility and scope of development priorities
- Developing detailed documentation of approved Integration Profile proposals
- Developing and maintaining the Pharmacy Technical Framework
This combined committee is composed of representatives of stakeholder organizations who are users or developers of healthcare IT systems and related to medication management. This committee is international in scope. All qualified stakeholders are invited to join.
Participation is open and voluntary, but in order to remain a voting committee member, participants must take part regularly in committee meetings and teleconferences and perform committee assignments. All IHE committee participants serve as representatives of IHE Member Organizations. Information on becoming an IHE Member Organization is available on the IHE Governance page. You can contact the secretary and the co-chairs of the IHE Pharmacy committee via email at pharmacy@ihe.net.
The Pharmacy committee maintains their working documents on dedicated pages on the IHE Wiki. There you can find committee roster, schedules of committee activities and works in progress.
Email communication among participants in the committees takes place through Google Groups maintained for this purpose. You can request an invitation to join the committee lists below.
Committee Co-Chairs
Planning Committee: Trudy Hagg, Jose Costa Teixeira
Technical Committee: Jurgen Brandstatter
Request to join the discussion list: IHE Pharmacy Planning and Technical Committee