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ASHP national survey of pharmacy practice in hospital settings: dispensing and administration--2005.

PURPOSE: Results of the 2005 ASHP national survey of pharmacy practice in hospital settings that pertain to dispensing and administration are presented. METHODS: A stratified random sample of pharmacy directors at 1173 general and children's medical-surgical hospitals in the United States was surveyed by mail. RESULTS: The response rate was 43.5%. Most hospitals had a centralized drug distribution system; however, there is evidence of growth in decentralized models compared with data from 2002. Automated dispensing cabinets were used by 72% of hospitals and robots by 15%. The percentage of doses dispensed in unit dose form increased, as did the use of two-pharmacist checks for high-risk drugs and high-risk patient groups. However, the percentage of medication preparation and dispensing quality-improvement programs declined over the past six years. Medication administration records (MARs) have become increasingly computerized over the past six years. Consequently, the use of handwritten MARs has declined substantially. Technology implemented at the administration step of the medication-use process is continuing to grow. Bar-code technology was implemented by 9.4% of hospitals, and 32.2% of hospitals had smart infusion pumps. Pharmacy hours of operation were stable, with 30% of hospitals providing around-the-clock services. About 12% of hospitals are using off-site medication order review and entry after hours. Pharmacy staffing has steadily increased over the past three years; however, hospital pharmacies reported a 5.6% vacancy rate. CONCLUSION: Safe systems continue to be in place in most hospitals, but the adoption of new technology is changing the philosophy of medication distribution. Pharmacists are continuing to improve medication use at the dispensing and administration steps of the medication-use process.

Drug Compounding↗

Direct order entry by physicians in a computerized hospital information system.

Implementation of a policy encouraging direct order entry by physicians in a computerized hospital information system is described. A fully integrated database system was implemented in this tertiary-care university hospital. Terminals are available in the patient-care areas, order entry is uncomplicated, and typing is not necessary. When entering medication orders, the physician can select screens that display either general-order or specialty-order sets that are similar to preprinted-order sheets. A program was developed by the pharmacy and nursing departments to help the physicians learn to use the computer system and to demonstrate its benefits. Physicians were offered a training program that could be taken in one six-hour session or as six one-hour segments. Pharmacy technicians were trained to assist physicians with order entry in the patient-care areas during the implementation phase. Hospital policy requires that orders not personally entered by the physician must be written by hand in the patient chart and reviewed and entered in the computer system by a pharmacist before being dispensed. The delays inherent in this procedure give physicians an incentive to use the terminals. The policy encouraging direct order entry by physicians has been broadly accepted and has enabled the hospital to standardize drug therapy ordering and encourage adherence to the formulary.

Computers↗

Computer physician order entry: benefits, costs, and issues.

Several analyses have detected substantial quality problems throughout the health care system. Information technology has consistently been identified as an important component of any approach for improvement. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is a promising technology that allows physicians to enter orders into a computer instead of handwriting them. Because CPOE fundamentally changes the ordering process, it can substantially decrease the overuse, underuse, and misuse of health care services. Studies have documented that CPOE can decrease costs, shorten length of stay, decrease medical errors, and improve compliance with several types of guidelines. The costs of CPOE are substantial both in terms of technology and organizational process analysis and redesign, system implementation, and user training and support. Computerized physician order entry is a relatively new technology, and there is no consensus on the best approaches to many of the challenges it presents. This technology can yield many significant benefits and is an important platform for future changes to the health care system. Organizational leaders must advocate for CPOE as a critical tool in improving health care quality.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗

An Internet-based ontology editor for medical appropriateness criteria.

Appropriateness criteria and practice guidelines seek to promote the cost-effectiveness use of medical interventions, and can be most useful when integrated with computer-based patient records and order-entry systems. Building an abstract model (ontology) of appropriateness criteria can require considerable effort among investigators at geographically dispersed institutions. To facilitate the construction and maintenance of ontologies for clinical appropriateness criteria, the author developed an Internet-based system for viewing and editing the knowledge model. The system, called NEON (Network-based Editor for ONtologies), uses the World Wide Web as a platform-independent user interface. NEON allows users to edit the indexing terms and the semantic network that form the ontology for a set of appropriateness criteria. Ontologies built using the system can be imported and exported using an open, internationally standardized format based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

Artificial Intelligence↗

Just-in-time delivery comes to knowledge management.

Like all primary care physicians, Dr. Bob Goldszer must stay on top of approximately 10,000 different diseases and syndromes, 3,000 medications, 1,100 laboratory tests, and many of the 400,000 articles added each year to the biomedical literature. That's no easy task. And it is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. The Institute of Medicine's 1999 report, To Err Is Human, suggests that more than a million injuries, and 90,000 deaths are attributable to medical errors annually. Something like 5% of hospital patients have adverse reactions to drugs, another study reports, and of those, 43% are serious, life threatening, or fatal. Many knowledge workers have problems similar to Dr. Goldszer's (though they're usually less life threatening). No matter what the field, many people simply can't keep up with all they need to know. In the early years of knowledge management, companies established knowledge networks and communities of practice, built knowledge repositories, and attempted to motivate people to share knowledge. But each of these activities involved a great deal of additional labor for knowledge workers. A better approach, say the authors, is to bake specialized knowledge into the jobs of highly skilled workers. Partners HealthCare has started to embed knowledge into the technology that doctors use in their jobs so that consulting it is no longer a separate activity. Now when Dr. Goldszer orders medicine or a lab test, the order-entry system automatically checks his decision against a massive clinical database as well as the patient's own medical record. Knowledge workers in other fields could likewise benefit from a just-in-time knowledge-management system tailored to deliver the right supporting information for the job at hand.

Benchmarking↗

Immediate benefits realized following implementation of physician order entry at an academic medical center.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the benefits of computerized physician order entry (POE) and electronic medication administration record (eMAR) on the delivery of health care. DESIGN: Inpatient nursing units in an academic health system were the setting for the study. The study comprised before-and-after comparisons between phase 1, pre-implementation of POE (pre-POE) and phase 2, post-implementation of POE (post-POE) and, within phase 2, a comparison of POE and the combination of POE plus eMAR. Length of stay and cost were compared pre- and post-POE for a period of 10 to 12 months across all services in the respective hospitals. MEASUREMENTS: Comparisons were made pre- and post-POE for the time intervals between initiation and completion of pharmacy (pre-POE, n=46; post-POE, n=70), radiology (pre-POE, n=11; post-POE, n=54), and laboratory orders (without POE, n=683; with POE, n=1,142); timeliness of countersignature of verbal order (University Hospitals [OSUH]: pre-POE, n=605; post-POE, n=19,225; James Cancer Hospital (James): pre-POE, n=478; post-POE, n=10,771); volume of nursing transcription errors (POE with manual MAR, n=888; POE with eMAR, n=396); length of stay and total cost (OSUH: pre-POE, n=8,228; post-POE, n=8,154; James: (pre-POE, n=6,471; post-POE, n=6,045). RESULTS: Statistically significant reductions were seen following the implementation of POE for medication turn-around times (64 percent, from 5:28 hr to 1:51 hr; p<0.001), radiology procedure completion times (43 percent, from 7:37 hr to 4:21 hr; p<0.05), and laboratory result reporting times (25 percent, from 31:3 min to 23:4 min; p=0.001). In addition, POE combined with eMAR eliminated all physician and nursing transcription errors. There were 43 and 26 percent improvements in order countersignature by physicians in OSUH and James, respectively. Severity-adjusted length of stay decreased in OSUH (pre-POE, 3.91 days; post-POE, 3.71 days; p=0.002), but not significantly in James (pre-POE, 3.68 days; post-POE, 3.61 days; p=0.356). Although total cost per admission decreased significantly in selected services, it did not change significantly across either institution (OSUH: pre-POE, 5,697 dollars; post-POE, 5,661 dollars; p=0.687; James: pre-POE, 6,427 dollars; post-POE, 6,518 dollars; p=0.502). CONCLUSION: Physician order entry and eMAR provided the framework for improvements in patient safety and in the timeliness of care. The significant cultural and workflow changes that accompany the implementation of POE did not adversely affect acuity-adjusted length of stay or total cost. The reductions in transcription errors, medication turn-around times, and timely reporting of results supports the view that POE and eMAR provide a good return on investment.

Academic Medical Centers↗

Overcoming barriers to adopting and implementing computerized physician order entry systems in U.S. hospitals.

Few U.S. hospitals have implemented computerized physician order entry (CPOE) in spite of its effectiveness at preventing serious medication errors. We interviewed senior management at twenty-six hospitals to identify ways to overcome barriers to adopting and implementing CPOE. Within the hospital, strong leadership and high-quality technology were critical. Hospitals that placed a high priority on patient safety could more easily justify the cost of CPOE. Outside the hospital, financial incentives and public pressures encouraged CPOE adoption. Dissemination of data standards would accelerate the maturation of vendors and lower CPOE costs. These findings highlight several policy levers to speed the adoption of this important patient safety technology.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

Alamance Regional Medical Center improves patient safety with CPOE.

While it is widely written that advanced clinical information systems can help healthcare organizations reduce adverse medical events and increase patient safety, Alamance Regional Medical Center (ARMC) has proven that it truly does. ARMC chose Eclipsys' Sunrise Clinical Manager for its ability to provide knowledge-based clinical decision support and its alert capabilities at the time of order entry. Since its organization-wide rollout in summer 2000, ARMC has been using the computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system with widespread success and has transformed the care delivery process.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

Decision support at the point of care: challenges in knowledge representation, management, and patient-specific access.

Many applications in a clinical information system can benefit from the incorporation of medical knowledge to provide patient-specific, point-of-care decision support. These include computer-based provider order entry, referral, clinical result interpretation, consultation, adverse event monitoring, scheduling, shared patient-doctor decision-making, and generation of alerts and reminders, among others. To be executable, knowledge must be represented in the form of rules, constraints, calculations, guidelines, and other logical/algorithmic formats. The main difficulty is that the integration of such knowledge into clinical applications, when it occurs, tends to be very system- and application-specific, often encoded in a programming language, or even in the formating specifications of a user interaction display. Also, the data references and services invoked are highly dependent on the system/platform and electronic medical record implementation. This makes it difficult and time-consuming to encode authoritative evidence-based knowledge, severely limits the ability to disseminate and share successes, and hampers efforts to review and update the logic as medical knowledge changes. Solutions to this problem involve the development of standards-based representations for medical knowledge, and tools for authoring/editing, dissemination, adaptation to local environments, and execution. Numerous approaches are being pursued, all of which will be described in this presentation.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗

The pharmacy as part of an integrated hospital information system: a focus on benefits.

An integrated hospital information system benefits not only the pharmacy but also each department within a hospital, including the physician and patient. The Composite Health Care System (CHCS) is a fully integrated healthcare information system that has been developed for the Department of Defense's medical treatment facilities. CHCS provides modules for Patient Administration, Patient Appointment Scheduling, Radiology, Laboratory, Pharmacy, and Physician/Nursing Order Entry and Results Retrieval, which serve to integrate inpatient wards, clinical services, administrative departments, and remote outpatient clinics. CHCS provides an integrated patient profile to care givers throughout the medical facility, improving the quality of their clinical decisions. The integrated hospital information system also helps to coordinate the delivery of patient care and automates many interdepartmental transactions, which allows for more efficient use of resources and increases the turnaround time for delivery of services. This article focuses on the system's pharmacy component to demonstrate the benefits realized with an integrated hospital information system.

Clinical Pharmacy Information Systems↗

A framework for analyzing the cognitive complexity of computer-assisted clinical ordering.

Computer-assisted provider order entry is a technology that is designed to expedite medical ordering and to reduce the frequency of preventable errors. This paper presents a multifaceted cognitive methodology for the characterization of cognitive demands of a medical information system. Our investigation was informed by the distributed resources (DR) model, a novel approach designed to describe the dimensions of user interfaces that introduce unnecessary cognitive complexity. This method evaluates the relative distribution of external (system) and internal (user) representations embodied in system interaction. We conducted an expert walkthrough evaluation of a commercial order entry system, followed by a simulated clinical ordering task performed by seven clinicians. The DR model was employed to explain variation in user performance and to characterize the relationship of resource distribution and ordering errors. The analysis revealed that the configuration of resources in this ordering application placed unnecessarily heavy cognitive demands on the user, especially on those who lacked a robust conceptual model of the system. The resources model also provided some insight into clinicians' interactive strategies and patterns of associated errors. Implications for user training and interface design based on the principles of human-computer interaction in the medical domain are discussed.

Cognition↗

Health Care Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: a useful proactive risk analysis in a pediatric oncology ward.

BACKGROUND: Pediatric inpatient settings are known for their high medication error rate. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the Health Care Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (HFMEA) is a valid proactive method to evaluate circumscribed health care processes like prescription up to and including administration of chemotherapy (vincristine) in the pediatric oncology inpatient setting. METHODS: A multidisciplinary team consisting of a team leader, pharmacy, nursing and medical staff and a patient's parent was assembled in a pediatric oncology ward with a computerized physician order entry system. A flow diagram of the process was made and potential failure modes were identified and evaluated using a hazard scoring matrix. Using a decision tree, it was determined for which failure mode recommendations had to be made. RESULTS: The process was divided into three main parts: prescription, processing by the pharmacy, and administration. Fourteen out of 61 failure modes were classified as high risk, 10 of which were sufficiently covered by current protocols. For the other four failure modes, five recommendations were made. Four additional recommendations were made concerning non-high risk failure modes. Most of them were implemented by the hospital management. The whole process took seven meetings and a total of 140 man-hours. CONCLUSIONS: The systematic approach of HFMEA by a multidisciplinary team is a useful method for detecting failure modes. A patient or a parent of a patient contributes to the multidisciplinarity of the team.

Adolescent↗

Prioritizing strategies for preventing medication errors and adverse drug events in pediatric inpatients.

OBJECTIVES: Medication errors in pediatric inpatients occur at similar rates as in adults but have 3 times the potential to cause harm. Error prevention strategies in this setting remain largely untested. The objective of this study was to classify the major types of medication errors in pediatric inpatients and to determine which strategies might most effectively prevent them. METHODS: A prospective cohort study was conducted of 1020 patients who were admitted to 2 academic medical centers during a 6-week period in April and May 1999. Medication errors were characterized by subtype. Physician raters evaluated error prevention strategies and identified those that might be most effective in preventing errors. RESULTS: Of 10 778 medication orders reviewed, 616 contained errors. Of these, 120 (19.5%) were classified as potentially harmful, including 115 potential adverse drug events (18.7%) and 5 preventable adverse drug events (0.8%). Most errors occurred at the ordering stage (74%) and involved errors in dosing (28%), route (18%), or frequency (9%). Three interventions might have prevented most potentially harmful errors: 1) computerized physician order entry with clinical decision support systems (76%); 2) ward-based clinical pharmacists (81%); and 3) improved communication among physicians, nurses, and pharmacists (86%). Interrater reliability of error prevention strategy assignment was good (agreement: 0.92; kappa: 0.82). CONCLUSIONS: Of the assessed interventions, computerized physician order entry with clinical decision support systems; ward-based clinical pharmacists; and improved communication among physicians, nurses, and pharmacists had the greatest potential to reduce medication errors in pediatric inpatients. Development, implementation, and assessment of such interventions in the pediatric inpatient setting are needed.

Adult↗