Taking the Pharmacy to the Next Level
By Lauri Gilliam, MBA PMP

You’ve gone through the vendor selection process, chosen a vendor, signed a contract, scheduled a kickoff meeting, and now it is time for implementation. It takes months to have a successful implementation and there are a myriad of details that have to be considered, evaluated, and completed. The department as a whole must decide the collective vision and goal of the implementation. Project leaders must be established and those leaders must be committed to a clear vision.

The goal should include, but is not limited to, an overall evaluation of workflow/performance, revenue generation/ROI, patient safety, and medication error reduction. The current workflow of the department should be evaluated, picked apart, and compared against the capabilities and functions of the system that is being implemented. This is the opportunity to decide what processes can and should be eliminated or adjusted. For example, if you are currently receiving physician orders by pneumatic tubes, or pharmacy technicians do hourly rounds then date/time stamp the orders for processing, consider fax imaging as a workflow process change. Instead of the current process, the next level process is to have those physician orders faxed through the system, captured in the system and presented on screen for the pharmacist in the pharmacy. The orders are collected and presented in the order received and stat orders are presented in red font and escalate to the top of the pharmacist action list. Another process change or workflow improvement might be, if technicians are currently manually delivering the Medication Administration Record (MAR) to the nursing station, consider automatically printing those records to the actual nursing station and eliminate the time it takes the technician to deliver.

Do you want to take your pharmacy to the next level? Implement an electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR) and rid the facility of that paper as much as possible! Choosing these and other options to take your pharmacy to the next level will increase performance, capture loss revenue, decrease medication errors, and increase patient safety. Not to mention save a tree.

Project leaders must have the ability to carry out the organizations vision and must continually enhance the team’s commitment. One way to achieve that is to develop amicable relationships within the team and other departments. It is essential that your pharmacy implementation is well received by other departments that will be influenced; nursing staff, medical staff, patient management, etc. Effective relationships should elicit cooperation, teamwork, and compliance from other areas. Other areas within the hospital should know the vision, be aware of the impact to their particular area, trained on any process changes, and know the benefits that the changes will bring. For example, delivering medications manually can be exhaustive and time consuming. Bar coding can fully automate the dispensing process. It will have qualitative and quantitative benefits, which include: improved patient care, streamline inventory control, charge capture accuracy, increased productivity, and reduction in human error.

Due to the implementation being so complicated, there is the risk that focus will be lost on those features and functions that are not passively activated. For example, clinical screenings have become a standard in pharmacy systems and can be used without much setup or involvement from the staff. However, there are other features that need active efforts. Those features that need active efforts to derive their full benefit require dedicated allocation of staff resources to implement and maintain. An illustration would be the rules and conditions feature. If the functions within this area are setup and maintained then it will allow for true clinical functionality, offering innovative ways to manage clinical services, document activities, and provide for intelligent rule sets. Without this effort by the pharmacy department the system that was suppose to take the pharmacy to the next level only offers small improvement over the previous system.

These examples are steps to optimize of your pharmacy application, as well as a pathway to a next level pharmacy. Completing these initiatives and others will pave the way to completing the closed-loop system, and be a foundation for the ultimate next level goal of implementing computerized physician order entry (CPOE).

For more information on implementing Pharmacy and other McKesson solutions please contact us at (610)444.1233 or vcs@getvitalized.com. You can also find more information about VCS’ services and solutions by visiting our website www.getvitalized.com.