Driven by regulatory mandates for antimicrobial stewardship, pharmacy leadership at this renowned, East Coast pediatric hospital wanted to strengthen the connection between the organization’s patient safety goals and frontline pharmacy’s contribution to those goals.The goal was to make pharmacy’s impact on patient safety more transparent to pharmacy teams, clinical colleagues and hospital management, while also more precisely measuring and optimizing frontline pharmacy’s contribution to clinically appropriate cost savings.
The hospital rolled out Wolters Kluwer’s Sentri7® Pharmacy and Antimicrobial Stewardship solutions to the pharmacy clinical team. At that time, pharmacy leadership used Sentri7’s turnkey, evidence-based library to establish a set of rules and metrics to strengthen the pharmacy’s impact on the hospital’s key initiatives by deploying technology to maximize effectiveness of its antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP) and management of drug spend.
One of the top priority ASP projects focused on the high use of vancomycin in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The ASP team worked with NICU clinicians to devise protocols that delineate when to consider vancomycin and when to discontinue it. It then turned to Sentri7 to help implement and document a 48-hour antibiotic time-out, which the pharmacist initiates on rounds. Led by the ASP Medical Director, the hospital’s systematic ASP approach decreased vancomycin use in the NICU.
In addition, once the NICU project was up and running, pharmacy leadership began performing prospective audits with feedback regarding the use of vancomycin throughout the hospital. Rules in Sentri7 now identify all vancomycin use and the system documents pharmacists’ interventions, enabling the hospital to monitor and directly correlate days of therapy with the interventions.
Access this case study to learn how using surveillance technology like Sentri7® Pharmacy helped standardize these key pharmacy initiatives that accounted for $1.2 million in cost savings, while improving patient safety and overall care.