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CRoME Interdisciplinary Approach

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A Marriage of Four Disciplines

Our interdisciplinary approach is the perfect marriage of four disciplines (Pharmacy, Public Health, Patient Safety & Systems Engineering).

crome disciplines

The CRoME Lab continually and consistently seeks to harness the key strengths of pharmacy, public health, patient safety, and systems engineering in our research and community engagement activities. Our research projects and community outreach efforts apply concepts, models, and theories that are grounded in four main disciplines:

Pharmacy & Pharmacists

  • Pharmacists are highly skilled medication experts and innovators in providing diverse patient-centered and population health-related pharmacy services in the communities in which they live and work.
  • Pharmacists are clinical practitioners, educators, medication use consultants, medication distributors, researchers, and system managers.
  • Pharmacists impact both patient- and population-level health outcomes, spanning the “micro” to “macro” levels of influence in public health.
  • Pharmacists’ impact can be seen across a variety of healthcare settings and systems.
  • Pharmacists practicing in community pharmacies have the unique potential to make public health interventions.
  • Pharmacies create opportunities for patients to quickly access the health care system, often because of their community-based locations that reduce potential barriers due to travel distance or a lack of transportation.
  • Projects in the CRoME lab leverage the strong accessibility of community pharmacists to drive high volumes of public health initiatives and interventions that can have positive and lasting impacts on numerous communities locally, nationally, and globally.

Public Health

  • The overarching goal of public health is to advance the health of individuals, communities, and populations.
  • Improvement in public health is accomplished through various methods such as research, policy, education, and prevention strategies often characterized as primary (preventing the development of disease), secondary (early detection of disease), or tertiary (slowing the progression of disease).
  • Projects in the CRoME Lab focus on promoting health, preventing disease, and enhancing quality of life.

Patient Safety

  • Patient safety is a distinct discipline that emphasizes safety in health care through the prevention, reduction, reporting and analysis of error and other types of unnecessary harm that often lead to adverse patient events.
  • Pharmacy and public health have made important advances in improving quality of life and patient safety.
  • Projects in the CRoME lab adopt novel approaches to improve medication safety, health literacy, and patient-caregiver communication.

Systems Engineering

  • Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on designing, integrating, and managing complex systems over a sustained period.
  • The Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model provides an excellent framework for integrating systems thinking to improve the quality of healthcare, pharmacy services, public health interventions, and patient safety.
  • Embedded in all CRoME Lab projects are systems thinking principles.
  • We utilize systems thinking to:
    • identify important areas of research
    • engage with community stakeholders
    • design, implement and disseminate pharmacist-led and public health interventions.

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