Somerset Hospital Closes Loop In Medication-Use ProcessOverview

The 120-bed Somerset Hospital services primarily a rural constituency in southern Pennsylvania.

One of the first customers of the Paragon® community hospital information system, Somerset regularly installed new Paragon modules soon after their availability to support pharmacy and clinical systems.

The organization’s strategic plan called for moving to electronic health records within five years. All that changed with the HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) Act. “The news of available stimulus funds changed our time horizon,” said chief information officer Jonathan Bauer. “Working with McKesson, we condensed our timeline to just 22 months. Overall, we plan to be at the first stage of ‘meaningful use’ by fall 2011.”

Challenges

With plans for computerized physician order entry and bar-code medication administration in place, Somerset turned its attention to the pharmacy. “We addressed the prescribing, transcribing, administration, and monitoring process, but not the dispensing portion of the medication-use process,” said Bauer. “We were looking for a solution that closed the loop by automating dispensing and improving accuracy and efficiency.”

Medication dispensing at Somerset is a manual process. The pharmacy performs a 24-hour cart fill, delivering approximately 600-800 scheduled medications to nurse servers located in patient rooms. For PRNs, some first doses, and narcotics, nurses access automated medication dispensing cabinets.

“The manual cart fill is one of the most inefficient processes in our department,” said Michele Russic, director of pharmacy. “It requires a lot of pharmacist and technician

Customer Spotlight

Somerset HospitalSomerset, PAwww.somersethospital.com

Solution Spotlight

– PROmanager-Rx™

Customer Spotlight

labor. There’s a lot of re-work. It’s repetitive work, so there’s the potential for people to lose focus, which increases the risk for dispensing errors.”

Continued Russic, “We didn’t want to go with all cabinets; there was limited space on the nursing units, plus we had limited medication storage space in the pharmacy. Also, when you put everything into cabinets, you’re really taking the dispensing function away from the pharmacy and putting the burden on the nurse.”

Answers

Their search for an automated, bar-code- driven dispensing solution for the central pharmacy led them to the PROmanager-Rx™ system. PROmanager-Rx is the only solution that enables hospitals to fully automate the dispensing, storage, and restocking of tablets, capsules, and other oral solid medications that come pre-packaged from drug manu-facturers in unit-dose, bar-coded form. The combination of manufacturer packaging, bar-code scanning of every dose, and sophis-ticated software makes PROmanager-Rx the safest automated pharmacy system available. In addition to the highest levels of safety, the system also reduces the packaging burden inside the hospital, saving both pharmacy labor and costs.

Explained Russic, “PROmanager-Rx is the right choice for us because it will automate about 80 percent of our daily cart fill, easily fits into our pharmacy layout, and is affordable. With PROmanager-Rx, we will be able to fill directly to the nurse servers, which is important to us. We want to keep the nurse in the room with the patient.”

The pharmacy plans to bar-code package and manually dispense non-oral solid medications—liquids, vials, patches, ampoules, etc., which will be the minority of the daily dispensing volume once PROmanager-Rx is installed.McKesson Automation Solutions

500 Cranberry Woods DriveCranberry Township, PA 16066(724) 741-8000www.mckesson.com

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