Designing a modular digital health curriculum for pharmacy education: a stakeholder-driven expert workshop study

International summary

Abstract

Digital health technologies are increasingly transforming pharmaceutical care, yet pharmacy education has been slow to integrate structured digital health content into curricula. This study aimed to co-design a modular digital health curriculum framework for pharmacy education through a qualitative, stakeholder-driven process grounded in the ADDIE instructional design model and informed by the DECODE digital health competency framework. Two structured expert workshops, conducted at the 10th PCNE Working Symposium (Innsbruck, Austria, February 2026), engaged 30 participants from 13 European countries in three sequential co-design activities: competency needs mapping, curricular design sprints, and framework integration. Competency prioritization identified four workshop-level agreement pillars: artificial intelligence in healthcare, electronic health records, ethics and legal-professional foundations, and digital health literacy, alongside strong support for telehealth and wearable/sensor technologies. Eight module outlines were co-designed, spanning electronic health records, health applications, large language models, telehealth, digital health literacy, artificial intelligence in healthcare and ethics/legal/regulatory topics, and were organized into a three-tier curricular sequence (foundational, applied and advanced) that differentiates mandatory core, pathway-specific and postgraduate/CPD content. Reported feasibility was shaped by faculty expertise, curriculum crowding, governance, accreditation and institutional digital maturity, while accreditation mandates, European regulatory directives, interprofessional collaboration and pilot programs emerged as key enablers. Participants critically appraised the DECODE framework, noting its medical education origins and advocating action-oriented learning outcomes and pharmacy-specific contextualization rather than direct transposition. By combining Theory of Change with an instructional, competency-based approach, this study provides an early-stage multinational co-designed digital health curriculum blueprint, tailored for pharmacy education, representing the Analysis and Design phases of ADDIE; Development, Implementation and Evaluation phases constitute future work. It offers an implementation-conscious blueprint for strengthening the digital readiness of the pharmacy workforce.