Current Status of Building Intelligent Pharmacy in China: A Cross-sectional Study

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the current status of hospital pharmacy automation and intelligent technology, and to provide references for the development of intelligent pharmacy in China. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted and questionares were collected by convenience sampling to understand the current status of building intelligent pharmacy in China. Hospitals were separated into different areas, levels and types, and the disparities in intelligent pharmacy construction were studied. For the statistical analysis, STATA 14.0 and SPSS 26 were used. RESULTS A total of 199 hospitals were included covering 30 provinces in China. There were 156(78.39%) tertiary hospitals; 90(45.23%) hospitals in the eastern area, 23(11.56%) in the central area, and 86(42.22%) in the western area. There were 127(63.82%) hospitals carried out the construction of smart pharmacies, while mostly were tertiary hospitals(124, 97.64%), and only 3(2.36%) hospitals were non-tertiary hospitals. The percentages of intelligent equipment coverage in drug storehouse, outpatient pharmacy, inpatient pharmacy, pharmacy intravenous admixture services, and surgical pharmacy were 107(53.77%), 123(61.80%), 127(63.82%), and 103(51.76%) and 94(43.24%), respectively. There was a difference in the coverage rate of equipment in each pharmacy which the whole process coverage rate was 5.03%-13.57%. The construction of intelligent pharmacy varies greatly in different angles, including that the east and central regions were significantly higher than those in the west, general hospitals and specialized hospitals were significantly better than traditional Chinese medicine hospitals in outpatient pharmacy, inpatient pharmacy and pharmacy intravenous admixture services. CONCLUSION The overall trend of intelligent pharmacy development in China is good. Sixty percent hospitals are equipped with intelligent equipment and forty percent hospitals are equipped in all main pharmacy. However, there are problems such as poor coverage of the whole process, unbalanced regional development, unbalanced development of hospitals at different levels and unbalanced development of different pharmacy. There are many needs to fill the gaps, clarify the definitions of intelligent pharmacy, and rapidly promote the construction of intelligent pharmacy that use multi-level angles and the concept of pharmacy management in the future.