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WEEK 22: You’re allergic to what?...
One third of all iatrogenic hospital events are medication related. Before electronic medical records were the norm, many facilities began incorporating Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) systems to reduce these Adverse Drug Events (ADE). Although overall this strategy was effective, it fell short of providing the full promise of additional safeguards desired to eliminate events that fully reached the patient (and introduced some new issues – but that is another discussion). About a third of all hospital medication errors were PREVENTABLE ALLERGY EVENTS. And some evidence indicates that this may be even more prevalent in the outpatient setting. 20% of all hospital admissions nationally fail to update allergies during a hospital admission. Twenty percent! Even for us old timers that still use ADCVANDALISM – you have three “As” to choose from to do allergies.
Historically we are not well versed in doing reconciliations, and allergies are no different. Our legacy inpatient and outpatient records don’t talk. Heck, our outpatient records allergy information is so mistrusted we redocument it into a hodge-podge of free text that relies on transcription errors and copy forwarded information that is usually ignored. But fret no more… we have a fully functional allergy component that works in any care environment. And, as we learned last week, it is bidirectionally shared with any of our HIE partners.
The easiest way: All Unfortunately, it still relies on human beings to reconcile allergies for it to work. Because of our legacy systems, the first time seeing a patient in MHS GENESIS will require a little bit of work to update the allergies. But after that – no more copy forward nonsense. No more inpatient/outpatient transcriptions. And, with every update (including the one that just completed) the allergy component gets easier and easier to use within your workflow…
The old (but still works) way: All With the latest update, the allergy component within your workflow can now manage virtually every facet of allergies. However, the update of allergies outside of your workflow (specifically in powerforms) will look slightly different. Eventually I expect us to rarely utilize this process, but until that happens you should at least be familiar with the historic look. You’ll notice that most of the fields are identical to what was previously shown (including the mandatory fields in Yellow). When your nurses/technicians update allergies, they will update in the component (and component will update here). The information is the same. Just different ways to view it.
Error prevention is that easy: All medication allergy checks are against this component and this component alone. (also checks food allergies for inpatients). 1 out of every 6 patients harmed in a hospital could have been prevented by making sure this is updated at every visit. It does take a little time…the first time. But after that it is simple to maintain and to reconcile (seriously – it’s a single button now and all right within your workflow.)
NEXT WEEK: We will continue our component journey trying to highlight some of the best functionality and how it can help you achieve better patient care while simultaneously improving your efficiency. As we get closer to Wave Nellis we will probably shift into a lessons learned for a couple of weeks. I’m also hoping to get some guest writers coming soon! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions about this or any of the other tech Tuesday topics! |
