EPIC HYPERSPACE EPIC CHARTING CHEAT SHEET ZIPMap views let clinicians identify potential opioid abusers seeking prescriptions from multiple providers across state lines."Īnd because MedHx Companion is not part of the EHR, the pharmacy team can find patients before admission, by alternate spelling, or by ZIP code. "This gives our clinicians a quick view of adherence gaps and prescription fill meters, along with the ability to sort by drug class. "We also implemented MedHx Companion to view patient medication history in a web-based, visual timeline," she continued. "MedHx provides more complete medication history data, reducing the time our staff has to spend calling pharmacies and providers to gather and confirm that information. "We implemented DrFirst technology in our Epic EHR to support the team's process of gathering and confirming a patient's medication history," she said. The hospital now has a team of 19 pharmacy technicians supporting four ED pharmacists from 6 a.m. South Shore's nursing department previously had responsibility for gathering and confirming a patient's medication list, but balancing that responsibility alongside their other duties was problematic and could potentially lead to errors.įormally assigning ownership of gathering medication history to the pharmacy department was a logical first step in reducing errors, ensuring safer transitions of care and maximizing ED staff productivity, Blum said. The DrFirst clinical team was available to work with South Shore staff to quantify how this new method affected clinical outcomes. To ensure pharmacy technicians focus their efforts on high-risk patients, South Shore staff created a patient complexity score embedded in the EHR to help identify and prioritize medically complex patients and allow these patients to be evenly distributed across the pharmacy team. "Just as a spreadsheet of raw data doesn't provide the same level of insight as a dynamic chart or graph, MedHx Companion takes the medication history data provided within the Epic workflow and visualizes it in a web-based application to reduce our staff's cognitive effort." "DrFirst also offered MedHx Companion to give us clinical insights into patients' medication histories," she added. "The vendor's SmartSuite adds another layer of clinical workflow support with artificial intelligence that normalizes prescription instructions, known as sigs, into consistent terms, safely infers missing information, and prepopulates drug and sig information within the Epic EHR, so our clinicians wouldn't need to manually enter medication information," Blum explained. It provides a combination of local and national medication history sources directly within the hospital's native Epic EHR workflow for a more comprehensive database of medication history than the hospital was receiving from the standard industry feed.Īlong with providing data from health information exchanges and other EHR partners, DrFirst would identify and connect with local pharmacies that share mutual patients to make the dispensed prescription fill information available to South Shore as part of the MedHx solution. South Shore Hospital selected health IT vendor DrFirst's MedHx solution to help. With more than 300 patient visits per day to the ED, and a third of those patients routinely admitted, the staff understood that improving the process and tools clinicians use to gather a patient's medication history could address some major sources of organizational pain – such as preventable ADEs and potential hospital readmissions – and could improve patient safety. In 2021, South Shore Hospital prioritized efforts to reduce costly ADEs and potential readmissions that commonly come from patients admitted through the ED. "A peer-reviewed study, Unintended Medication Discrepancies at the Time of Hospital Admission, investigated the potential for adverse drug events as a result of inaccurate medication history and found that up to 70% of patients have errors on their medication list when admitted to the hospital through the ED, and up to 59% of these errors can cause harm," said Rachel Blum, clinical pharmacy manager at South Shore Hospital in South Weymouth, Mass. EPIC HYPERSPACE EPIC CHARTING CHEAT SHEET MANUALPatients may be unconscious or unable to communicate, making manual or verbal confirmation of a patient's home medication list challenging. Emergency departments are by nature fast, hectic environments where clinical decisions need to be made quickly, often with limited information.
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