Thursday, November 29, 2007

Medication Reconciliation Vendors

So my trip through Atlanta post Thanksgiving turned into an eight hour delay and a wonderful opportunity to witness frustration first hand.... and it wasn't pretty. Let's just say the airline employees should be considered for hazardous duty pay.

As mentioned in a previous post, I work for a company that specializes in developing clinical solutions for hospitals. We've been selling a medication reconciliation solution for almost 3 years which makes us the old man on the block and in my humble opinion, the best. Not so much because we have market share and a great solution but because we've already experienced the "gotchas" and "oh crap's" associated with deploying any new system. What is readily apparent as I go up against other vendors is their lack of understanding for what hospitals are trying to accomplish across the board. Vendors.... all Vendors, are trying hard to be the one stop shop for medication reconciliation when the truth is, it takes a great deal of buy in from all disciplines across the system. Anyone familiar with CPOE knows that it's not as easy as getting the docs to use it and med-rec has the same, albeit not as far reaching, symptoms of poor adoption and scope creep if not managed correctly. The blogger in me would like to tell you how to successfully implement a solution as an adjunct to your process but the salesman in me knows this is a public forum and let's face it, my bills don't get paid by writing this blog. Just to be fair, I will tell you there are a few viable solutions in the marketplace that everyone should be looking at. I'll list them in a moment. If you are in fact interested in a 3rd party solution to help you with medication reconciliation, make sure your check list is complete. Here's a few questions to ask.....

  • How will your system work with our current process
  • How customizable is your system to our needs
  • How many data sources to you obtain data from
  • How much does it cost
  • Can i speak to a reference
  • What can we expect to gain from this
  • Does the system work across the continuum

These may sound like logical questions but I'll be honest with you, i don't hear them enough when I'm out there selling. Now, here's a list of a few vendors you may want to consider

  • Health Care Systems
  • Thomson
  • Quovadx
  • DrFirst
  • Siemens
  • Design Clinicals

You already know who I think the best is......

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ah yes, Thanksgiving is over and every one's back at work, including me. Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the Atlanta airport (apparently there's fog somewhere so just to be safe, the entire airport is at a standstill). Just gives me time to update the blog.

This week there's a new account going live with an automated medication reconciliation solution (designed by the company I work for). This group should be of particular interest because they are incredibly pharmacy centric. Based on my observations, hospitals that utilize pharmacists heavily for the medication reconciliation process tend to have higher success rates and much better error prevention. This is not to say nurses are doing a bad job, it's simply that pharmacists, for obvious reasons, understand medications and medication habits better than other specialties. So this group plans on utilizing our system for automated medication history retrieval which will be directed to a printer. Then, pharmacy technicians will perform the initial review and assessment followed by an overview from the pharmacist. All appropriate interventions will take place immediately and then the form is passed on to the next caregiver. At time of discharge, the original assessment document will be compared to the inpatient profile. The physician will then make recommendations for discharge medications and a discharge profile is created and discussed with the patient. Sounds simple huh......
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