Sydney Berkey is a final-year PharmD candidate at Thomas Jefferson University College of Pharmacy.
At Thomas Jefferson University (TJU) College of Pharmacy, digital health is being integrated into the curriculum to ensure student pharmacists are prepared for both clinical rotations and postgraduate careers. Although there are yet to be classes solely dedicated to digital health, professors at TJU have made it a point to incorporate concepts of digital health throughout all didactic years whenever possible.
Getting practice during the pandemic
Due to the pandemic, the class of 2024 spent our first year of pharmacy school purely online, so we got a lot of exposure to digital health. For example, for the Preventative Health Care and Self-Care Issues course, student pharmacists were responsible for interviewing patients (a.k.a. paid actors) about common ailments that were easily solvable with OTC products, such as heartburn and constipation. These standardized patient encounters via Zoom simulated a telemedicine visit. Since telemedicine encounters were our first professional experiences interviewing and interacting with patients, we quickly got used to the nature of delivering care through a screen. Now that classes are fully in-person, most of the current first-year student pharmacists get little exposure to digital health except for a brief introduction about how it’s currently being utilized in the profession.
Gaining professional experience
During the second half of didactic years, digital health is more of a priority. In all of our pharmacy practice labs, electronic health records (EHR) are used for students to get an understanding of how an EHR operates and how to navigate them. Students also have the opportunity to practice as a clinical pharmacist. TJU pays for EHR Go (Archetype Innovators, Duluth, MN), an educational EHR tool that allows professors to input health data for a variety of patient cases, thus mimicking real EHR systems. Mayan Olorife, a current second-year PharmD candidate, mentioned that using EHR Go for a variety of assessments helped her get more out of her hospital IPPEs and make connections quickly when physically working with EHR systems.
During our endocrine-focused therapeutics course, student pharmacists are taught about continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems and their current role in caring for patients with diabetes. Students are taught how to counsel patients about their Freestyle Libre (Abbott Diabetes Care, Inc., Alameda, CA)—or similar equivalent products—and how to interpret results from their online patient specific database. Not only are students taught visually, they are given opportunities to physically log in to interpret blood glucose data and make recommendations for therapy modifications. This exposure to CGM monitoring systems prepared me immensely for my ambulatory care IPPE, which specialized in diabetes.
I was able to get professional experience with these systems and gain an understanding of these systems from a patient perspective, including how they’re somewhat cumbersome and technologically advanced. Olivia Zdradzinski, a current final-year PharmD candidate, stated “My definition of digital health has really been shaped by all of these (curriculum and rotation) experiences.”
Overall, digital health is expanding and becoming an integral part in how health care professionals are providing care to patients; therefore, I believe it should be a necessary part of all pharmacy school curricula.