The timing of student Informatics exposure came up in a recent discussion with Doina Dumitru, an Informatics colleague and editor of The Pharmacy Informatics Primer. We were approached by a well known college about the possibility of offering an elective Pharmacy Informatics course to students. You can imagine our excitement and enthusiasm for this request. We started charting out the curriculum and lecture topics, as well as appropriate class timelines. Initially we hoped to offer this during the summer of the student's second professional year, but quickly came to realize some challenges.
First, students lacked the pharmacy practice experience to understand much of what we taught. Informatics is an extension of the clinician, a way to take our experience and build it into computers. Students just don't possess the knowledge to absorb the implications or reasons for Informatics decisions. Informatics is about our practice experience, not about being an IT person. The IT skills are necessary, but secondary. Pharmacy workflows, regulations, and clinical practice play a big part in our decision making process. Paralleling the importance of these points to pharmacy curricula, we realized the students would not be ready for an entire Informatics course until a portion of their final clinical rotations were complete. While there may be an exemplary example with years of pharmacy technician or externship experience, it was not enough to justify a course.
Integrating a handful of lectures on Informatics topics into a required management course might be a better alternative, but what about the lecture content? The topics should focus on well known, high impact subjects such as Meaningful Use, the HITECH portion of ARRA 2009, and the overall impact of technology on pharmacy practice. How has technology shaped our profession over the past 30 years? What does Meaningful Use "mean" to the practicing pharmacist? How can pharmacists help their institutions and colleagues in healthcare with adoption of medication use methodologies in information systems? What is an electronic health record and how do medications flow through them? Topics such as automation technologies, downtime, data mining, and report writing came up in our discussions, but the group felt like they would be perceived as low impact lectures. In student speak "we will watch the lecture on video and sleep in a few hours."
The next topic was on how many hours of content the lectures would provide. The topics need to be targeted, high impact discussions that spark interest in the profession. They need to grab the student's attention and flip a few light bulbs to the "on" position. This is still an open discussion, but I would estimate 6 hours to cover the high impact topics.
Students are a precious resource, and represent our legacy. It is important for us to develop their exposure to Informatics in an interesting and paced manner. I welcome your comments and questions.
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