Future of Pharmacy Informatics

Pharmacy informatics will likely continue to grow in its scope and importance for some time. When, in 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the report To Err is Human, the pharmacy community was at once called out for allowing unsafe medication management practices to preponderate and called upon to dramatically improve the safety of medication use in the United States. The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP, [4]), a leading patient safety organization, is well positioned to advance medication safety efforts. ISMP continues to focus on pharmacy informatics and patient information management as key areas of both promise and concern, promise that the application of new information technologies will improve patient safety and concern that the diffusion, adoption and best-practice use of medication management technologies is happening too slowly. Time will tell if pharmacy informatics, as an area of applied information sciences and as a sub-discipline of health informatics, will indeed positively transform medication use so that patients benefit from improved safety and efficacy with respect to the medications they require.