Changing Behavior is Key to Optimizing Medication Use
In the face of increasing margin pressures—and having already implemented many supply chain optimization steps—your pharmacy team can use surveillance to help identify new ways to reduce costs without compromising quality or patient safety.
And by drawing on the expertise of your pharmacy team and the power of clinical surveillance software like Sentri7, your organization can change behaviors necessary to improve clinical, financial and operational performance.
You can accomplish these goals by:
- Using real-time clinical surveillance with sophisticated patient identification and stratification rules to quickly identify exceptions that your pharmacy teams need to review.
- Monitoring changes in patients’ status over their admissions to react quickly to rising risks for patient safety or adverse events.
- Leveraging in-depth analytics and reporting to understand trends, and achieve both immediate and sustained improvements in medication selection via provider engagement and education.
Three Ways Pharmacy Leadership Can Improve Hospital Performance
Support Formulary Management
Quickly identify and respond to opportunities for therapeutic substitution for high cost and restricted agents and therapeutic classes.
Identify At-Risk Patients
Monitor patient data in the EHR to identify patient safety concerns and reduce the risk of medication-related adverse events.
Execute Focused Stewardship Programs
Antimicrobial and opioid prescribing benefit from duration of therapy and/or MME-standardized reporting to recognize patterns and opportunities to de-escalate.
By focusing on these three key areas, hospitals can optimize medication use to improve care, reduce avoidable patient safety events and ensure prescribing of the most cost-effective treatments. Other benefits:
- Reduce antimicrobial resistance by ensuring the appropriate use of antimicrobials.
- Lower the incidence of healthcare-acquired infections, such as C. difficile, by improved management of modifiable risk factors, including antimicrobial use.
- Improve opioid safety by increasing the use of multi-modal therapies for pain management, thus avoiding over-sedation events and reducing other side effects.
