Customer Spotlight
Somerset Hospital Closes Loop
Customer Spotlight
Somerset Hospital
Somerset, PA
www.somersethospital.com
Solution Spotlight
– PROmanager-Rx™
McKesson Automation Solutions
500 Cranberry Woods Drive
Cranberry Township, PA 16066
(724) 741-8000
www.mckesson.com
In Medication-Use Process
Overview
The 120-bed Somerset Hospital services
primarily a rural constituency in southern
Pennsylvania.
One of the first customers of the Paragon®
community hospital information system,
Somerset regularly installed new Paragon
modules soon after their availability to
support pharmacy and clinical systems.
The organization’s strategic plan called
for moving to electronic health records
within five years. All that changed with the
HITECH (Health Information Technology for
Economic and Clinical Health) Act. “The
news of available stimulus funds changed
our time horizon,” said chief information
officer Jonathan Bauer. “Working with
McKesson, we condensed our timeline to just
22 months. Overall, we plan to be at the first
stage of ‘meaningful use’ by fall 2011.”
Challenges
With plans for computerized physician order
entry and bar-code medication administration
in place, Somerset turned its attention to the
pharmacy. “We addressed the prescribing,
transcribing, administration, and monitoring
process, but not the dispensing portion of the
medication-use process,” said Bauer. “We
were looking for a solution that closed the
loop by automating dispensing and improving
accuracy and efficiency.”
Medication dispensing at Somerset is a
manual process. The pharmacy performs a
24-hour cart fill, delivering approximately
600-800 scheduled medications to nurse
servers located in patient rooms. For PRNs,
some first doses, and narcotics, nurses access
automated medication dispensing cabinets.
“The manual cart fill is one of the most
inefficient processes in our department,”
said Michele Russic, director of pharmacy.
“It requires a lot of pharmacist and technician
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labor. There’s a lot of re-work. It’s repetitive
work, so there’s the potential for people
to lose focus, which increases the risk for
dispensing errors.”
Continued Russic, “We didn’t want to go
with all cabinets; there was limited space
on the nursing units, plus we had limited
medication storage space in the pharmacy.
Also, when you put everything into cabinets,
you’re really taking the dispensing function
away from the pharmacy and putting the
burden on the nurse.”
Answers
Their search for an automated, bar-code-
driven dispensing solution for the central
pharmacy led them to the PROmanager-Rx™
system. PROmanager-Rx is the only solution
that enables hospitals to fully automate the
dispensing, storage, and restocking of tablets,
capsules, and other oral solid medications
that come pre-packaged from drug manu-
facturers in unit-dose, bar-coded form. The
combination of manufacturer packaging,
bar-code scanning of every dose, and sophis-
ticated software makes PROmanager-Rx the
safest automated pharmacy system available.
In addition to the highest levels of safety, the
system also reduces the packaging burden
inside the hospital, saving both pharmacy
labor and costs.
Explained Russic, “PROmanager-Rx is the
right choice for us because it will automate
about 80 percent of our daily cart fill,
easily fits into our pharmacy layout, and is
affordable. With PROmanager-Rx, we will be
able to fill directly to the nurse servers, which
is important to us. We want to keep the
nurse in the room with the patient.”
The pharmacy plans to bar-code package
and manually dispense non-oral solid
medications—liquids, vials, patches,
ampoules, etc., which will be the minority
of the daily dispensing volume once
PROmanager-Rx is installed.