The value-based landscape continues to evolve, and healthcare organizations are standing at a strategic crossroads regarding how to best leverage and allocate pharmacy resources.
Going forward, a critical element of any strategy that promotes care optimization must acknowledge the critical role that pharmacy plays in outcomes improvement. Simply put, it will take a "top of license" approach to pharmacy resources, which frees pharmacists from low-value tasks, allowing these professionals to become integral players in more collaborative, interdisciplinary care delivery. As forward-looking organizations embrace and adopt this model, many are finding that the best solution is implementing the right technological infrastructure while working in tandem with better processes.
A strong first step to understanding where pharmacists can provide the greatest value within an organization is to conduct a gap analysis around key performance and quality measures and then look for areas where pharmacists can have a significant impact. Since medications are the number one way pharmacists can treat and prevent disease, there are usually many obvious opportunities. Improving the management of chronic disease, reducing readmissions and avoidable medication adverse events, and improving patient engagement are outcomes around which pharmacists have repeatedly demonstrated value.
Addressing the issues identified in the gap analysis will likely require changes in workflow, standardization of care processes and improving the delivery of evidence-based care. In the modern healthcare environment, new care initiatives or new workflows should be supported by flexible IT structures that provide the necessary tools for driving improvements in patient outcomes and driving clinical intelligence reporting. Gap analyses targeting organizational improvement often indicate that robust health information technology that optimizes the use of clinical decision support (CDS) systems—including clinical surveillance technology—are highly valuable for improving quality measure performance, preventing or mitigating the risk of adverse events and reducing readmissions.
While EMRs have been a critical first step in health IT evolution, the current reach of CDS in these applications is limited in that it is not able to consider all of the relevant contextual patient data that exists. The combination of rules-based, real-time, advanced surveillance technology and evidence-based CDS solutions allow healthcare organizations to better leverage the full potential of their EMR investments through much richer aggregation of patient data that renders alerts more relevant to a patient's true condition and also provide guidance on appropriate, evidence-based care options.
An advanced solution like Sentri7® Pharmacy aggregates disparate patient data in real-time creating a more accurate patient picture from admission/discharge/transfer information, labs, pharmacy data, radiology and surgery. The application's smart logic is used to develop alerts that enable real-time and ongoing monitoring of patient care to impact performance, equipping pharmacists with better information, streamlined workflows and more proactive response to care.
Consider the impact of Sentri7 on antimicrobial stewardship alone. Data supports that hospitals leveraging the solution reduce antimicrobial usage by 15-25 percent, which for one hospital equated to $750,000 of annual savings on antimicrobial agents. In addition, one large New Jersey-based multi-hospital system increased the number of patients reviewed for antimicrobial appropriateness and potential de-escalation from 35 percent to 92 percent resulting in improvements in clinical care and cost savings.
It's a new day for the pharmacy within the evolving performance and risk-based reimbursement landscape. Strategically positioning pharmacy resources for the future will require a combination of thoughtful analysis, workflow governance and a solid foundation of technology to ensure pharmacy resources are optimized for the highest level of care delivery.
