Healthcare : Enhancing Patient Safety

Due to the large number of consumers being prescribed multiple medications, and the complexity of managing those medications, it is of a major safety concern that systems are in place for clinicians to reconcile patients medications to resolve any discrepancies in what the patient is using, or should be using, and newly added ones.

In the classroom, it is very important to have lab safety. In a hospital pharmacy, lab safety is essential to ensuring a safe dosage to each patient. Throughout my time interning as a pharmacist at the UVM Medical center, I was often observing how much pharmacists used DoseEdge software. DoseEdge automated system that assists the process of dose routing and preparation. This product of Baxter has allowed the tasks of pharmacy change. The focus of my project was “How does current and future technology affect efficiency and accuracy in pharmacy practice?”. Through my research of Baxter’s website, articles about their product, and reports of advancing technologies in pharmacy, I found that DoseEdge is very successful in productivity and safety in the workplace. Before DoseEdge, everything was required to be prepared by hand. This required a lot of responsibility for for pharmacists and technicians to make the correct dosage in the quickest manner. Medicine is very important to a hospital, so it is very important to have the most efficient way in preparing and distributing it. This allows pharmacist to have a better way of double-checking the preparation of drugs. In each IV hood, there is an overhead camera that takes pictures of what drug and how much of it the technician is using. Pharmacist can view multiple orders all by computer without the need of being physically next to the technician. There are also requirements to have two pharmacists check the same order for high risk drugs like chemotherapy. This

Since I work at Fairview Southdale Hospital as an inpatient pharmacy intern, I notice that we have pharmacy technicians who are in charge of delivery medications and Pyxis machine throughout the day because we are not that rely on our tube system and we are running out of tubes in the main pharmacy; however, at Regions Hospital, they deliver almost every medication through tube system, and the tube system has programmed to maintain the tube numbers in each station. This advanced tube system is wonderful which helps reduce the workload for pharmacy technicians and also brings efficiency to

If I was a Physician that worked in a doctor’s office, I would have nothing but great things to say about e-Prescribing. If my supervisor asked me to present five positive aspects to my team, I would have no problem at all. E-Prescribing is a great new peak in technology that essentially will make the lives of physicians easier. Doctor’s offices are always packed with many people waiting on appointments and e-Prescribing will allow for appointments to run more smoothly, on time, and with less mistakes. The first positive point that I would make about this new technology is that it makes it easier to verify insurance. The tools presented within this system allow for physicians to see what type of medications the patients insurance will cover.

E-Prescribing is an incentive by the Centre for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It allows the electronic transmission of prescriptions between qualified medical practitioners and physicians. The aim of the program is to improve the drug prescription system by avoiding errors resulting from handwritten prescriptions. The E-prescribing program runs on various standards. These standards are spelt out and added in Part D of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act 2003 (CMS, 2013).

The purpose of this project is to decrease potential medication errors in the facility. This will be done by following some strategies:

Vital improvement for patient safety has triggered an enormous amount of positive change in the healthcare system. There were “1.6 million adverse events each year that led to 180,000 deaths” (Liang & Mackey, 2011). In a review, avoidable errors led to $19.5 billion dollars in healthcare expenses (Liang & Mackey, 2011). The National Patient Safety Agency analyzed 425 deaths from acute care hospitals and found “15% of the deaths were related to unrecognized patient deterioration” (Higgins, Maries-Tillot, Quinton, & Richmond, 2008). This finding led to the Institute for Health Care Improvement’s promotion for the use of an early warning scoring system to assist with identifying deteriorating patients (Albert & Huesman, 2011).

In the discharge pharmacy, they receive calls all day long from nurses asking where the medication and when it can be expected to be delivered. The calls from nurses are symptoms of an inefficient system that does not allow medication orders to be tracked. Medication tracking system eliminates the need for replacing lost or late medication and decreases pharmacy and nursing time searching for medication by knowing when the medications left the pharmacy and where it was delivered, it can also help identify the last person to handle of medication to eliminate diversion.

However, to keep track of what medicines patients take, when and in what doses, especially from

Most of the prescribing procedure takes place in the emergency supervision area, where paper-based prescribing is most excessively used, so this setting holds an appreciable scope for electronic prescribing to be accomplished. E-prescribing has permitted prescribers to electrostatically transmit patient's medication particulars to pharmacy computers.

We have tested our program to the fullest, ensuring that it exceeds the industry’s standards. A dosing calculator is built in, Google Maps can locate your patient’s favorite pharmacy, and we remember your favorite prescriptions and sigs. With just a few short clicks, you will be sending safe and efficient prescriptions that meet Medicare’s e-prescribing directive, the Superscripts Hub, and Meaningful Use.

Since I work in the retail setting, I was unfamiliar with the standard procedure of operations in the hospital. I learned that doctors placed orders, which then the pharmacists sometimes have to electronically enter into a system called EPIC. Often, orders are already entered by nurses into EPIC, so the pharmacists would check the order by reviewing the name of the medication, dosage, frequency, and administration route, such as intravenously, intramuscularly, or subcutaneously or intravenous push.

The only thing about this system is that the patient would have to be ok without the medication until the next day. With the system heavily leveraging on automation, it does not require a lot of technicians or pharmacist. Further leveraging could be done with medication synchronization programs to make efficiencies better. Also, with this system the pharmacist can be free to help the patients at the counter when they pick up their medications. It will create an office like based pharmacy practice. If there was a high percent of patients that were synchronized and were picking up medication at the same time; the pharmacist would be able to sit down with them one by one to do medication monitoring. Although it has its perks, central filling can turn for the worse when it comes to work flow. It has the possibility to turn the environment into a mail order environment and possibly get rid of access from the patient to the pharmacist.

An electronic source that I found useful in prescribing medication is Prescription Pad software. Prescription pad software is developed by the Compurx Infotech company. It is a medical software that promised a 100% safe, fool-proof and first rate prescription to a patient because of its ability to automatically checks for drug interactions and duplications (CompuRx Infotech, 2015). Once the medication brands name is entered in the prescription writing area., the software can detect limitations that a patient may have such as pregnancy, lactation, children, elderly, hepatic insufficiency, renal insufficiency & pulmonary insufficiency.

Set-up and workflow of my pharmacy is pretty good for patient centered care. Patient does not have to wait too long for their prescriptions to be filled. Patients can call for their refills via telephone or online, which makes their life easy as they don’t have bother coming in-person for refills. Patient profile shows all medication history as well as number of refills remaining. This makes it easy for pharmacist to know whether to refill a prescription or call doctor for refill request. After confirming to fill a prescription pharmacist runs claim through insurance and print label after claim is successful. All medication is arranged alphabetically on shelves, thus it is easy and quick to retrieve. Then after technician fills medication and then pharmacist checks it. This workflow is quite smooth and quick to process. Final check is done by pharmacist, who confirms right medication for right patient as well as the NDC dispensed, amount dispensed, direction for use, and day supply. All these steps of process take place on working table in sequential order, which helps to reduce errors in filling and have effective prescription filling. Once the prescription is filled pharmacist do all paper