Academic electronic health records as a vehicle to augment the assessment of patient care skills in the didactic pharmacy curriculum

Introduction: Standards 2016 state students must be "practice-ready" upon graduation and utilizing health information technology is one skill needed to ensure students are practice-ready. Incorporating academic electronic health records (EHRs) into the didactic pharmacy curriculum is one tool for preparing students to be practice-ready, but it is unclear if this technology is used to facilitate assessment of students' patient care skills. Methods: A 35-question electronic survey was distributed to each school/college of pharmacy (S/COP) with questions focused on general use of EHRs and characterizing EHRs as a tool to assess students' patient care skills in the didactic curriculum. Aggregate, anonymous data was reported and analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: Fifty-nine survey responses were suitable for inclusion in the analysis (43.8% response rate). Of those, 37 S/COP (62.7%) used an EHR in the didactic curriculum. Frequently performed and assessed EHR functions were collecting information and documentation, and EHRs were most commonly utilized to assess students' abilities to perform the collect (96.9%) and assess (93.8%) steps of the Pharmacists' Patient Care Process. EHRs were perceived to be most effective in assessing the following Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education Educational Outcomes: patient-centered care (93.9%), problem solving (83.9%), and learner (80.6%). Conclusions: Optimizing the use of EHRs in S/COP is critical. Determining which outcomes are best suited to be assessed utilizing this technology and the optimal method to do so is an appropriate next step.