What will hospitals look like in 5 years?

Technology helps hospital system lower costs and avoid errors

This article is overly simplified. Does this imagined ROI take into account the increase demands on nurses' time when bar coding is not implemented correctly, or when a state board of pharmacy makes the use of bar code scanners impossible by overly rigid rules on scanner inactivity? --Larry

Technology helps hospital system lower costs and avoid errors
By reducing redundancy and switching gears, the Sisters of Mercy Health System—a group of 26 hospitals in four states in middle America—has challenged traditional thinking and found innovative ways to save $109 million in health care costs and avoid more than 150,000 potential medication errors that could have harmed patients. Katy Alspaugh, an intensive care unit nurse at Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, knows firsthand what it’s like to be one of the “have-nots” in a world where technology is increasingly becoming a health care worker’s BFF, best friend forever. Katy Alspaugh, ICU nurse at Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City, scans medication bar code. “In 2005, I began working as an ICU nurse in Lubbock, Texas, at a hospital twice the size of Mercy. The only backup I had to make sure I was giving the right meds to my patients was clicking through a checklist in my head. That was it,” says 28-year-old Alspaugh. “I came to Mercy a little over a year ago, and now I can’t imagine caring for patients without having this technology to track medications.” Mercy invested $35 million in 2003 in bar-code technology—just one element of a massive overhaul in how Mercy provides health care—to reduce potential medication errors. Only a quarter of hospitals in the nation use this technology, and it’s paying off big time for Mercy in improved patient safety. “I remember one day when I was getting ready to give one of my patients an antibiotic from their medication drawer and, when I scanned the med in, the bar-code technology alerted me that it wasn’t my patient’s med,” Alspaugh recalled. “In the transition from pharmacy to our ICU, it ended up in the wrong place.” In a long and complicated journey, medications make their way from supplier to patient, passing through a multitude of hands and steps. By putting technology to work, along with checkpoints at every turn, today, on average, every medication destined for a Mercy patient is tracked 10 to 20 separate times before it’s used. “All medications continue to be electronically tracked throughout a patient’s stay at nearly every Mercy facility,” said Vance Moore, president of Resource Optimization & Innovation (ROi), Mercy’s supply chain division. “There’s a rigorous safety process in place before a medication ever reaches a patient. We want to do everything we can to reduce medication errors but not delay delivery to the patient.” “We wish as nurses and medical professionals we were perfect, but we’re human and it’s a sobering truth we live with every day,” Alspaugh said. “So when there’s technology available that ensures my patients get the right meds and the right dose at the right time, I’m going to choose the hospital that helps me care best for my patient.” With Mercy encountering more than 2.7 million patients in the past year, eliminating redundancy in processes and systems has also meant nurses, pharmacists and other medical workers have fewer distractions, allowing them to do what they do best—care for patients. The Sisters of Mercy Health System—the eighth largest Catholic health care system in the United States—includes 26 hospitals and more than 1,300 physician practices in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Mercy was recently named the top health care supply chain operation in the world, second overall to global giant Johnson & Johnson. RNL Published 2/17/2010 , Vol. 36, No. 1

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mashable.com

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EMar: Is It doing what it was Intended to do?

No one can argue the benefits of bedside medication verification systems in ensuring patients enjoy the five rights of medication administration. But, at what cost?

Inherent with the use of E-Mar is a more complex system that adds additional steps and additional points in the process where the nurse needs to wait for steps within the process to occur. In addition to compromising working conditions for nurses by adding complexity and demands on their time, the time it takes for a patient to receive a medication once it's ordered has increased dramatically.

Remember the days when the goals were to get a new antibiotic administered within two hours after the physician has ordered it. Think that sa still happening? I don't.