27 May Linking EHRs with medication cabinets for improved safety
‘It is critical that what the nurse sees at any point is up to date’
Increasingly hospitals are recognizing the value of interoperability between electronic health records and automated dispensing cabinets, or ADCs. In addition to eliminating redundancies during the medication ordering process, linking them helps to reduce medication errors at the point-of-care.
[See also: Bar code tech and eMAR significantly reduce medication errors]
Hackensack University Medical Center recently unveiled this interoperability between its ADC from Omnicell and its Epic EHR.
Now nurses are able to easily interface with the complete medication management system within one application at the patient’s bedside, said Nilesh Desai, director of pharmacy at HackensackUMC.
[See also: Medication tracking system helps Ohio hospital cut waste]
“With the addition of the interoperability piece, it is now embedded directly into Epic and as you open a patient’s chart, automatically you can launch and schedule the medications and view if the medication has been delivered by pharmacy or not,” said Desai.
With this interoperability, he said, that there’s not a separate login and the nurse doesn’t have to remember another password: It’s connected to the EHR and it directly opens up to the patient’s chart.
Normally when there is a medication that has to be delivered from the pharmacy, the nurse has to go back to the cabinet or look into the cabinet to see if pharmacy delivered it or not.
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