Providing efficient and safe patient care requires a coordinated effort among many hospital departments. Patients are solely focused on getting better but a vast majority are unaware of just how many departments are involved in delivering that care. One of those vital departments is the hospital pharmacy. And just like other departments across the hospital, the pharmacy can use technology to drive better efficiencies and workflows.

To understand how technology can enhance a hospital pharmacy’s safety and efficiency, it’s important to understand how medications are prescribed and administered within healthcare organizations. Once a provider has determined the appropriate medication, this is communicated to pharmacy as a simple sentence (e.g., “cefazolin 1 gm IVPB every 8 hours”).

Once the pharmacy receives this order the pharmacist has a great deal of flexibility as long as they meet the clinical intent of the prescription. Some factors that may be considered are:

• What products are available to be dispensed and from where?
• What dosage forms are available (capsule, tablet, injection, topical, etc.)?
• Which dosage form(s) will be acceptable for the prescribed administration route?
• What is the most cost-effective product choice to minimize potential waste?
• What is the safest choice to minimize nurse dose manipulation prior to administration? (i.e., is there commercially available strength that matches what was prescribed or does the requested dose require multiple or partial products?)
• What administration instructions need to be provided for safe administration?

This process takes time; time pharmacists don’t have. But what if, instead, your EHR had a solution that could automate this process? By applying more than a dozen logic steps, the pharmacist can be instantly presented with the appropriate dispensable product to review and approve, giving them more time to focus on other patient-focused tasks, such as therapy reviews and safety checks. This automated process means that the turnaround time between a medication being prescribed and administered is greatly decreased.

At Altera, we saw the need for this type of solution. Sunrise™ Pharmacy delivers this through an integrated process called Smart Selection. Smart Selection seamlessly integrates into your workflow to make it easier than ever for doctors to write prescriptions and for pharmacists to dispense them.

In my next blog I’ll dive into how solutions like Sunrise Pharmacy can also help hospitals build up their financial strength. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about Sunrise and Sunrise Pharmacy, go here.

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