Validation of a Scorecard of Quality and Activity Indicators for Telepharmacy Pharmaceutical Care Services in Spanish Hospitals.

Purpose: Telepharmacy must be monitored within a quality management system in order to guarantee the efficiency, safety and quality of the activities it encompasses. The Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy has proposed the first scorecard of quality and activity indicators for Telepharmacy (TIS). The objective of this project is to validate this TIS for its implementation in hospital pharmacy services.

Material and methods: The project was developed in 4 phases: elaboration of the validation questionnaire/validation criteria; selection of hospitals where the study will be carried out; completion of the validation questionnaire by the selected hospitals; analysis of the results, a proposal of conclusions, and preparation of the final document. The validation criteria were performed using the RAND/UCLA methodology for each of the 5 TIS characteristics: holistic, practical, quantitative, usability, and continuous improvement. Characteristics were considered validated when the median was found to be within the score range 5-9 and at least 2/3 (66.66%) of the respondents scored in the range containing the median.

Results: Forty-four hospitals were included and the responses related to TIS characteristics were: holistic=8.2 and 98.5% of responses >5; practical=7.9 and 98.9% of responses >5; quantitative=7.9 and 98.6% of responses >5; usability=6.9 and 87.37% of responses >5; continuous improvement= 7.9 and 100% of responses >5.

Discussion: TIS has been validated for use in hospital pharmacy services and its tools and supporting documents are very useful and comprehensive. Hospital informatics systems are needed to allow efficient extraction of the data necessary to obtain the TIS indices.