ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses pharmacy informatics and its importance and history. The selection, implementation, and management of automation has become so significant a role in pharmacy practice that it is now considered its own specialty with its own advanced training and unique skill sets. Information technology and automation, collectively called informatics, improve the medication use process and can help advance pharmacy practice and pharmaceutical care. Automation is not an endpoint in itself, but is a tool. It can help pharmacists better achieve optimal medication use. Pharmacy informatics improves patient safety by building into the medication process a system of checks and balances that would be humanly impossible to know, remember, and perform. Experience with driving "meaningful use" of electronic medical records systems has demonstrated both benefit and harm from these systems. The use of informatics can provide details on what has taken place in the drug-use process—the ordering, perfecting, preparing, dispensing, administering, monitoring, and education of the use of medications.
