Table 3.

Pharmaceutical care key performance indicators.

Indicator	Discussion	Outcome
Performance/Medicine substitution	Measures how often pharmacists substitute medicine in accordance with doctors to prevent drug interactions	Show the impact and success of pharmaceutical care
Hospital admission, frequency, and duration (after pharmacy interventions)	Possible in disease-specific pharmaceutical care programs with good documentation. Measurements could be taken before and after the pharmacy-led intervention.	Show an increase/reduction of hospital stay after pharmacist-led intervention
Number of pharmacy-led interventions	Relatively easy to measure. However, there is large room for interpretation. Depth of intervention could pose problematic.	Show the number of times a pharmacist intervenes in drug therapy
Number of drug-related problems / medication errors	Classical indicator with regard to pharmaceutical care; however, the possibility of measurement depends on the vigilance systems in different settings.	Show possible reduction of drug-related problems/ medication errors in a disease-specific pharmaceutical care. Can be performed with a rather small group of people.
Patient satisfaction	Regularly evaluated together with pharmaceutical care programs.	Difficulty in interpretation of this indicator, because often not subjective.
Regular customers Trust Patient-pharmacist relationship Prescriber-pharmacist relationship	Considered as very subjective; therefore, it is difficult to measure and compare it between practitioners and settings.	Show the relationship of pharmacist with patients, customers, or prescribers.
Process indicators (on key elements of pharmaceutical care, e.g., counselling, documentation)	Proposed indicators are questions on the process: “Is electronic documentation available?” “Is clinical pharmacy implemented?” “Are there indications having intensive programs?”	Questions answered easily, and can show the level of presence of pharmaceutical care.
Health status indicators, e.g., morbidity rates	Easily measurable and standard indicators in many health systems. Interpretation can be problematic, as it is difficult to attribute an improvement in health to pharmaceutical care only but may include a number of many other factors.	May show improvement over period of time.

Adapted from Morak et al. (2010).