# Engineering Resilient Community Pharmacies (ENRICH)

> **NIH AHRQ R18** · UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON · 2024 · $499,985

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
The increase of people with complex chronic health conditions is stressing the U.S. healthcare delivery system.
People needing chronic care management (CCM) are at a high risk of medication safety issues and health-
related harms, such as hospitalizations and emergency department visits. Community pharmacies play a role
in ensuring patients’ safe medication use for CCM, but their efforts are undermined by volatile work demands
and other system barriers. In preventing medication hazards for people needing CCM, pharmacy staff are
further hampered by the historical preoccupation with what “went wrong” (a Safety-I approach), rather than
also considering the vast majority of times that things “go right” (a Safety-II approach). This project seeks to
reengineer the pharmacy system to advance a combined Safety-I and Safety-II approach to improve CCM.
Our transdisciplinary team of pharmacists, health services researchers, engineers, and quantitative and
qualitative researchers will partner with pharmacies in 2 large healthcare organizations (Advocate Health, UW
Health), and Boscobel and Center independent pharmacies, to design and evaluate a pharmacy work system
of care that optimizes resilience. To achieve this objective, we will create the Medication Safety Map
(MedSafeMap) for pharmacists and technicians to better navigate complex pharmacy tasks, and to facilitate
communication with patients and clinicians, while safely providing medications for patients dealing with CCM.
The CARE (Concepts for Applying Resilience Engineering) and SEIPS (Systems Engineering Initiative for
Patient Safety) models will be used to define and address the complex pharmacy work system issues that
exacerbate medication safety risks for patients needing CCM. Human factors and systems engineering will be
used to carry out the AHRQ RFA-required 5-step method. Aim 1 will focus on problem analysis of the work
system through pharmacist and technician stakeholder observations and interviews, and analyses of work
system information flow and artifacts, which will illustrate relationships among work system features that are
then addressed in Aims 2 and 3. Aim 2 will employ participatory design and in-situ simulations to develop and
design MedSafeMap detailing pharmacy redesign recommendations to optimize pharmacist and technician
interactions within their work system and with patients/caregivers. For Aim 3, we will implement and evaluate
MedSafeMap impact on CARE/SEIPS resilience outcomes – pharmacy staff attitudes, behaviors, performance,
and work demands (interviews and surveys), time involved in tasks (time and motion analysis), types and
quantities of services provided, and perceived changes in medication-related problems (self-reported data).
This innovative transdisciplinary PSLL seeks to redesign interactions to strengthen pharmacy staff resilience
while ultimately improving medication safety for patients needing CCM. This study, therefore, responds to an...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10927373
- **Project number:** 5R18HS029608-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
- **Principal Investigator:** Michelle Anne Chui
- **Activity code:** R18 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** AHRQ
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $499,985
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-09-30 → 2027-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10927373

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10927373, Engineering Resilient Community Pharmacies (ENRICH) (5R18HS029608-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-27 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10927373. Licensed CC0.

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