Community pharmacies and eHealth services: Barriers and opportunities for real Primary Healthcare integration

Background: Primary Healthcare (PHC) reforms are presently addressing chronic-disease management. It is of importance to science and society to understand how eHealth services could be developed and used to address the challenges of health services integration like community pharmacies within PHC. Method: Focusing on the two initial steps of Design Science Research Methodology, a mixed methods approach was used with an online survey to collect data on use of Information Technologies (IT) in community pharmacy, followed by an exploratory observational time and business processes study, using the shadowing method. Results: The current state of IT usage in Portuguese community pharmacies is mainly focused on medicine dispensing. Pharmacists spend 50% of their time in patients´ interactions, 38% on administrative tasks. Patterns of used time reflect a need to internal reorganization of pharmacies in order to enable eHealth pharmaceutical services provision.