PharmaTrend as a management tool: experience with the program.

A hospital's experiences with two pharmacy workload measurement systems, PharmaTrend and the pharmacy productivity unit (PPU) system it replaced at the institution, are compared. In 1976 a 352-bed general acute-care hospital implemented the locally developed PPU system. Typical drug distribution-related activities were defined and were assigned standard times per work unit; miscellaneous activities were assigned constant times per month. The PPU system served the institution well but had three important limitation: (1) new pharmaceutical services were not adequately represented, (2) the data collected had to be manually manipulated in order to calculate indicators, and (3) it was not possible to compare the data with those of similar institutions. In January 1988 the hospital implemented PharmaTrend. PharmaTrend was found to be a useful management tool because of the relative ease of data collection and the system's report-generation capabilities. By combining pharmacy workload data (including non-drug-distribution-related components) with data on finance, personnel hours, and patient admissions, PharmaTrend calculated indicators that were used for determining staffing and other needs and for financial reporting. The limitations of the PPU system were eliminated, except that it was still not possible to make valid comparisons with other hospitals because of the small number of participating hospitals that consistently report data to the PharmaTrend database. PharmaTrend offers advantages over previous pharmacy workload-monitoring systems by allowing for the expanded analysis and application of data.