SAN DIEGO -- The job of administering medications to patients has gotten safer and more efficient for nurses at Jeff Anderson Regional Medical Center (JARMC) in Meridian, Miss. with the installation of the new Omnicell, Inc. (NASDAQ:OMCL) Point-to-Point Medication Safety(TM) solutions.
The integration of Omnicell's OmniRx(R) medication dispensing cabinets and Safety Med(TM) RN bedside medication administration system adds six new safety checks, while eliminating the need for nurses to search for patients at the cabinet or document overrides and other decisions at both the cabinet and the patient bedside.
The announcement was made during a news conference held at the 2006 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference and Exhibition.
"Before this integration, a nurse would go to the cabinet and scroll through all the patients in the unit to locate his or her patient, then search through what can be a long list of patient medications to find due meds," explained Ken Nichols, PharmD, JARMC's director of pharmacy. "Add the need to compare the approved medications with the patient medication administration record and you have a process that is both time-consuming and fraught with potential errors. The possibility of two nurses, both caring for the same patient, giving medications to a patient, further complicated the process. Now nurses only see what medications are due. If the medication has been documented as administered by another nurse, the medication is not listed as 'due' at either the medication dispensing cabinet or on SafetyMed RN, the mobile bedside medication administration system."
"Nurses really like the new system," Nichols added, who notes that he has automated the entire medication-use process -- from central pharmacy to bedside -- allowing him to manage the pharmacy operation of the 260-bed hospital with 14 people. Two years ago, he had a staff of 22 people."
With Omnicell's Point-to-Point Medication Safety solutions, a nurse signs in using a secure pass code and the system automatically lists his or her patients and due meds, according to Jan Moss, Omnicell's SafetyMed RN product manager. Through a series of bar code checks, the system verifies and documents the entire process, while issuing alerts about drug interactions or other potential problems.
Six Points of Safety
The six points of safety added by the Omnicell Point-to-Point Medication Safety solutions include:
-- SafetyStock(TM) bar code confirmation at the medication dispensing
cabinet uses bar codes to verify that the correct medication is stocked
in the correct cabinet bin.
-- SafetyStock verifies that the correct medication is obtained at the
time of issue.
-- For non-pharmacy-reviewed orders, allergy alerts are provided at both
the point of use and the point of administration.
-- OmniRx-SafetyMed RN integration identifies due meds, preventing errors
of omission as well as errors of duplication. The medication override
process is integrated and can be conducted either at the OmniRx cabinet
or at the patient bedside with SafetyMed RN, improving nursing
efficiency and data input accuracy.
-- SafetyMed RN uses bar codes to verify the accuracy of patient
medications.
-- OmniRx-SafetyMed RN integration generates a Dispense Versus
Administration Report which tracks compliance and enhances billing
accuracy.
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