OVERVIEW
At Anne Arundel Medical Center, the organization’s core mission is to enhance the health of more than 1 million people they serve daily. Headquartered in Annapolis, MD, the facility hosts more than 1,000 medical staff members, employees and 750 volunteers sharing a collective vision for a healthier future.
Led by Chief Nursing Officer and VP of Nursing Barbara S. Jacobs, the facility engaged Medacist to deliver a comprehensive suite of drug diversion analytics and tracking technology to realize time savings, easy adoption and ensure patient safety.
Medacist’s RxAuditor Investigate™ was chosen to deliver actionable information on the medication use process to help ensure better patient safety outcomes.
THE CHALLENGE
Anne Arundel Medical Center sought a solution that would align nursing leadership and provide multidisciplinary teams with the resources to combat the ongoing epidemic.
Addressing this challenge can be especially difficult. Traditional reporting and detection methodologies on the surface can look harmless. For example, a false positive can occur when a new nurse doesn’t understand the timed policies for discarding waste and hasn’t properly identified the benign event.
Ann Arundel Medical Center needed a solution that would save time, enhance data reporting qualities and enable healthcare providers to focus their efforts where it counts most, spending time with their patients.
SOLUTIONS AND RESULTS WITH MEDACIST
Anne Arundel Medical Center established a dedicated diversion committee equipped with the RxAuditor Investigate platform to achieve, better alignment and a greater efficiency in the dissemination of critical health-related objectives and potentially overlooked vulnerabilities
Chief Nursing Officer Jacobs leads the diversion team with weekly audits with the goal of providing the highest level of care possible. On the benefits of integrating RxAuditor Investigate, Jacobs noted: “This platform eliminates the need to manually research reports and investigate cases of diversion, which saves me hours of work. Overall, this aspect of RxAuditor Investigate is a considerable aid in proactively preventing diversion.”
With its core ability to detect misuse, RxAuditor Investigate has the power to go beyond manual-level insights addressing common “what if” situations. “With several months of data loaded, we immediately detected an individual that had been under suspicion for a couple of months prior and had taken a while to identify,” said Jamie Caldwell, Director of Pharmacy Services, Ann Arundel Medical Center. “Had we had RxAuditor Investigate up sooner, we could have easily detected this individual at the onset.”
The nursing staff has around the clock access to Medacist support specialists and technical supervisors from installation to daily questions.
Unlike other drug diversion solutions, Medacist maintains a dedicated application support specialist for each hospital to provide more efficient and personal support.
“To tell you how many hours it saves, I can't even imagine,” said Trischa Schnaubelt, Lead Automation & Controlled Substance Specialist at Anne Arundel Medical Center. “We have hundreds of nurses and thousands and thousands of narcotics going out of this place every day. I can't even put it into words how much time it saves.”
Medacist’s RxAuditor Investigate is now a standard tool used in senior-level director meetings within the facility and reaffirms the trusted partnership that spans several years with Medacist in delivering a best-in-class solution and level of care.
All Bluesight solutions are based on a simple idea: if providers can keep track of every medication dose from manufacturing to the patient, problems of inefficiency, waste, and patient safety are solved. That’s Medication Intelligence.
This post is related to:
Drug Diversion Monitoring, Diversion Prevention
