Dear Colleagues,

Digital healthcare and information technologies are some of the fastest growing industries internationally, with global medical knowledge expanding rapidly. It has been argued that in the short-term future, the majority of healthcare jobs will depend upon digital skills: Indeed, understanding of healthcare data will play a pivotal role in shaping pharmacy services.

Within pharmacy, the first steps have been undertaken to explore the use of digital healthcare and information technologies to contribute to the optimisation of evidence-based practice. Literature includes examples, among others, of linking data sets from different divisions in national healthcare systems, of using pharmacy-based service provision data to shape policy, of digital systems and their potential integration in pharmacy workflow to minimise medication errors, as well as the use of artificial intelligence and robotics to augment patient care.

However, technology-enabled provision of pharmacy services is still in its infancy, and there are many challenges that the profession needs to overcome to lead the digital transformation: National integrated technological solutions for patient health records are yet to be achieved, despite the opportunity they provide to track outcomes of services and interventions, investigate for confounding factors, and contribute to better patient care; pharmacists and pharmacy teams have, to date, limited training in digital skills and effective use of data; frameworks around effective governance processes and patient confidentiality will need to be developed.

We would therefore like to invite you to share your experiences and research around digital healthcare and information technologies that support patient care and how they shaped or can shape evidence-based practice. In addition, we want this issue to be an opportunity to showcase how pharmacy is contributing internationally to changes in education, training, and approaches to patient care to effectively shape policy so that digitally supported care becomes the norm in the pharmacy profession.

Dr. Efi Mantzourani
Dr. Karen Hodson
Guest Editors

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