Comprehensive literature examination to derive terminology currently used to describe pharmacist provided services and to develop a checklist for research and journal editors

Background: Reporting of pharmacist interventions in research publications requires a detailed description of the intervention and language used to evaluate them. However, reviews and meta-analyses of publications of pharmacist interventions often reveal insufficient and incomplete information. Further practitioners and policy makers who rely on pharmacists publications to inform decision making, identified lack of cohesiveness in the manner in which pharmacist interventions are described in publications. Incomplete reporting of interventions hinders the optimal use of research, and fails to meet broader applications. Pharmacist researchers are aware of CONSORT but the median overall compliance is low and the checklists is not fully appropriate for pharmacist interventions. The purpose of this research was to develop a checklist, with key emphasis in intervention and standardized lexicon to potentially enhance the quality of pharmacy research. Methods: This is a 4-step study. First stage was to extract the actual services provided by pharmacists from the methodology section of publications and compile a services provided category. The search for publications focused on PubMed database and evaluated using the PRISMA checklist. Second stage was to assess existing checklists used by researchers and design a draft checklist. The remaining two stages will externally validate the checklist by collecting qualitative feedback from experts in research, policy, and practice. Stage three is to validate the content of the draft checklist to a collection of relevant manuscripts with the help of independent reviews. State four is to conduct large-scale iterative testing to demonstrate relevance to a wider range of stakeholders. Results: From a database search of nearly 4,581 publications 30 RCT publications were eligible for extracting actual services provided by pharmacists. The SNOMED CT was also used to extract services. The terminologies were then added to the checklist. The checklist included 7 main questions (constructs) titled Intervention, Provider, Delivery Mode, Demographic, Schedule, Setting, and Authorization. Stage three and four are proceeding this summer. Conclusions: A draft pharmacist intervention lexicon and checklist has been developed for use by pharmacist. A unique advantage of this proposed checklist is the incorporation of an evidence based lexicon within the checklist providing the pharmacy service nomenclature to use in publications.