Pharmacy Practices and Technologies: Evidence for Effectiveness and Adoption into Canadian Hospital Pharmacy Practice.

Significant progress has been made in the adoption of evidence-based decision-making by clinical pharmacy practitioners. However, in other areas of pharmacy practice, such as drug distribution, evidence-based decision-making appears to be more limited. Eriksson1 recently reinforced the need for pharmacists to identify and use trusted sources of information for decision-making in all areas of pharmacy practice, in order to optimize patient health outcomes. One important area where evidence-based decisions are needed relates to the use of certain practices and technologies in the drug-use process. In particular, it is of interest to know how long it takes the pharmacy profession to implement evidence-based practices and technologies.2 We hypothesized that the adoption of innovations in pharmacy practice has been as slow as the reported adoption of health care innovation more generally,2 in terms of rate of uptake of evidence-based practices, such as unit-dose drug distribution systems, centralized IV admixture systems, and decentralization of pharmacists working in patient care programs. The aim of this exploratory study was to examine the adoption of new pharmacy practices and technologies in Canadian hospitals and the relationship between actual adoption and published evidence supporting adoption.