System interfaces to facilitate follow-up pharmaceutical care in the United States

Abstract

System interfaces are crucial in complex engineered systems but are understudied in follow-up pharmaceutical care. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a working definition of the concept "system interface" within the context of follow-up pharmaceutical care in the US Healthcare System. To achieve this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with various healthcare system stakeholders. The transcripts of these interviews were analyzed to identify the needs expressed by each interviewee, which were then aggregated at the stakeholder level. Overlapping needs were identified to determine which stakeholders needed to interact for a system aiming to fulfill that need. The results revealed that enhancing healthcare operations, enhancing patient engagement, and educating patients required the highest number of interactions, with 98, 95, and 91 interactions across 18, 17, and 18 stakeholders, respectively. In total, the needs overlap analysis yielded 26 additional functions that may be a component of a follow-up pharmaceutical care system to meet multi-stakeholder needs. These findings suggest that system interfaces are presently an ambiguous component of the system design in follow-up pharmaceutical care despite contributing significantly to the system's complexity.