Central pharmacy saves time and improves accuracy by automating the physician order management process with Omnicell’s OmniLinkRx™ system.
St. Vincent Healthcare is a 314-bed medical center serving South Central and Southeastern Montana and Northern Wyoming. During a 24-hour period, our pharmacy staff, totaling 40 FTEs, processes an estimated 1,700 physician orders. Before automating the physician order management process with Omnicell’s OmniLinkRx physician order management system in June 2005, our 24-hour central pharmacy employed a manual system with an average order entry time of 30 to 60 minutes per physician order.
Prior to implementing OmniLinkRx, during the day, three decentralized pharmacists would round and process physician orders on the nursing units or go back to their satellite pharmacies and complete order entry from the yellow NCR order copies. When the decentralized pharmacists went home for the day, the nurse or ward clerk would need to fax orders to the main pharmacy.
In the evening,the pharmacists would process the orders from the central pharmacy and during the night one pharmacist would continue the process as orders were faxed in. As you can imagine, this was very time-consuming, and if the fax machinewas down or if the pharmacist got called away to a nursing unit, order processing time could take much longer.
With the implementation of 15 OmniLinkRx senders, we had two distinct goals:
- to get rid of the carbon copies, which were often hard to read
- to have access to the original physician order to reduce pharmacist errors during the order entry process
The decrease in our order entry time since implementing OmniLinkRx has been an added bonus. The average order entry time now ranges from 12 to 13 minutes, down from 30 to 60 minutes.
Today, we have a total of 19 OmniLinkRx senders, with new sending units added in the cardiac cath lab, outpatient surgery, and the emergency department, helping us comply with JCAHO’s requirement for pharmacist review of physician orders. Now our pharmacists can perform the reviews and quickly process the orders for those areas, which pleases our nurses and physicians as well.
Since the original physician orders are now digitized and sent directly to the central pharmacy, a pharmacist can be confident that orders are being tracked and processed – especially the STAT orders– while they are providing patient education, completing medication reconciliation, or providing other clinical services. This has been wonderful, allowing the decentralized pharmacists to handle orders while remaining connected to their patients in their clinical role and providing patient education. In addition, OmniLinkRx’s digital orders are much easier to read than paper copies of physician orders. We can even zoom in to clarify a doctor’s handwriting, resulting in fewer calls to the nursing unit or to the physician's office.
OmniLinkRx also allows nurses to monitor and track how well the pharmacists are responding to physician orders. They can review the order online, see it in process, and find out who handled order entry and when the medication will be available for patient. This technology has helped to decrease phone calls between nursing and pharmacy, because the information is available online for their review. We also are doing more system audits allowing nurses and pharmacists to collaborate on ways to improve patient care.
Kathy Manfull, RPh, MHA, is the pharmacy supervisor and pharmacy applications analyst for St. Vincent Healthcare in Billings, Montana.
Reprinted with permission from Pharmacy Purchasing & Products, Vol. 3 #9. ©2006 Ridgewood Medical Media, LLC, Ridgewood, NJ. All rights reserved.