Workgroup Identifies Use Cases for Pharmacy Data Interoperability

A workgroup of the nonprofit Sequoia Project is seeking feedback through Feb. 13 on a draft “Pharmacy Care: Use Cases for Health Information Exchange” document. Meg Murphy, Surescripts pharmacy and regulatory affairs manager, and a co-chair of the pharmacy workgroup, spoke with Healthcare Innovation about its goals. 

Murphy said the workgroup is trying to paint the picture of how pharmacy interoperability is working today and using specific use cases describe how information is accessed and shared. She said the effort has helped map out how things are working today, what barriers continue to exist and how things could be improved in the future. 


“We want the industry and interoperability leaders to be able to look at his document and better understand why pharmacists need access to information and what pharmacists can contribute in terms of information,” she explained. “We want to send the message that pharmacists are trusted care team members and must be integrated into national health information exchange frameworks like TEFCA and connected to QHINs. As that interoperability framework is really built around trust, we want these use cases to help illustrate why pharmacists are a trusted member of the care team."

 This draft paper outlines real-world pharmacy care scenarios, highlighting where interoperability can enhance care quality and delivery while reducing costs, and including pharmacists as an integral part of a patient’s care team. The use cases were developed by the subject matter experts who are participants of the Interoperability Matters Pharmacy Workgroup.
 
The Pharmacy Workgroup was launched in 2025 under The Sequoia Project’s Interoperability Matters program and is sponsored by Surescripts, National Association of Chain Drugstores (NACDS), American Pharmacists Association (APhA) Foundation, and National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) Foundation. 

One of the messages that comes through from the use cases is that pharmacy teams need to be able to access and afford modern care management systems, Murphy said. Pharmacy has long operated within their pharmacy management systems, which are really built around dispensing activities, but when it comes to care activities pharmacists need to be able to document, and then store and exchange data with other providers and payers, she added.

One of the use cases involves chronic disease management. It gave an example of a pharmacist documenting a patient's blood pressure reading and recommendations made to the patient to reflect the care provided. The use case said that using a pharmacy management system or other technology tool, the data could be exported. For example, the pharmacist might be able to share encounter information using the HL7/NCPDP Pharmacist eCare Plan (PeCP) data standard, but that may or may not be ingested by payers or provider EHRs.

“Many pharmacy management systems have incorporated the eCare plan, so the pharmacist is able to use that standard to document care provided,” Murphy said, “but as described in the use case, what we often see is that that standard hasn't been fully adopted in EHRs, and therefore this shows up as a PDF in a lot of cases and isn't necessarily incorporated into the patient's record more seamlessly. So greater adoption and recognition of the eCare plan is certainly one step that would be helpful.”

Another use case involves hospital discharge to home. In the example given, the pharmacist doesn't have access to information about the patient's hospital stay and has to spend time via phone trying to clarify that information. At the use case notes that pharmacists don't receive admission, discharge and transfer (ADT) notifications that are sent to primary care providers through the EHR or a third-party system, and they also don't receive discharge summaries. 

Murphy noted that when patients are admitted into the hospital, usually they are asked who their preferred pharmacy is. That’s on file as the hospital sends prescriptions upon discharge. “What if at that time that you designated the preferred pharmacy, that was able to trigger the ADT notification and then discharge summaries would reach the pharmacy when that time came?”

She closed by saying that the next step for the workgroup would be publishing a final document this spring. “We want to make sure there's as much awareness of this as possible. We think that this helps folks who may not be as familiar with the care pharmacists are providing in communities and not as familiar with the state of pharmacy interoperability today,” Murphy said. “We hope the recommendations that we provide in the use cases will be good food for thought as folks who are figuring out how they may able to support this, because it really does take action from all stakeholders to help move this forward. We're going to use this as a jumping-off point. We want to create a visual representation of pharmacy interoperability today and continue to identify any and all standards and systems and tools that pharmacists are using today to support the care that they're providing.”