Skip to contents
In This Issue:
A new electronic scheduling tool shared by Nursing and Pharmacy is helping to improve patient care by eliminating discrepancies in medication scheduling. The new scheduler editor tool, which went live last week, is shared between the Pharmacy Information System and the electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR).
“We had received a lot of feedback from users about discrepancies in patients’ medication schedules because the old system did not have all of the scheduling options that were needed,” said Anne Bane, MSN, RN, manager of Clinical Systems Innovations for the Department of Nursing. “Nursing, Pharmacy and IS have worked together for the past year to create a tool that both Nursing and Pharmacy can use to view and update the medication schedules for patients.”
Because the systems are now linked, a nurse can make changes to the medication schedule, and that information is automatically sent back to the Pharmacy and updated in the schedule. “If a nurse decides that a patient needs to receive an IV medication sooner than previously scheduled, she can now update the schedule in eMAR and that update tells us to start preparing the IV medication earlier and have it ready when the patient needs it,” Tom Cooley, RPh, MBA, assistant director of Pharmacy, said.
The new functionality gives a visual display of the information to both Pharmacy and Nursing staff. “It also allows for the creation of simple and complex medication administration schedules,” said Kara Jelloe, of the BWH Clinical Systems Team in IS.
Pharmacy can schedule medications to better meet physicians’ orders and the clinical care of the patient, particularly for those patients with less routine schedules. For example, a patient may be prescribed to receive a certain medication two times a day, but only on five days during a week. “Our old scheduling system didn’t allow us to set that accurately, but now we can,” Cooley said.
Nurses and pharmacists completed a successful pilot of the scheduler editor tool. “It will solve many of the scheduling issues that contributed to patients missing doses,” Cooley said.
More information on the changes is available through HealthStream.