As a non-profit health system serving nearly 1 million people in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, our pharmacists at Emanate Health need the right technology to quickly access important information. This can be difficult if pharmacists are solely reliant on IT staff to create dashboards showing metrics that are crucial to pharmacy operations.
At Emanate Health, we’ve empowered pharmacists to leverage data visualization tools that have helped overcome previous workflow challenges. Real-time insights gained from analytics inform our decision making and increase efficiency within pharmacy operations. Here are some tips on how to incorporate data visualization into pharmacy processes.
Consider the possibilities
Coming up with a comprehensive analytics strategy can be like navigating a new frontier for many healthcare organizations. At Emanate Health, we collaborated with MEDITECH to create tailored Business and Clinical Analytics (BCA) dashboards in Expanse. Initially, BCA was mainly leveraged by our IT department. However, in 2020 we created a COVID-19 dashboard that proved to be valuable across our entire health system, which instilled trust from executives when evaluating further usage of the tool.
This success sparked new questions and ideas from our teams, especially the pharmacy group. What if non-IT staff could create their own dashboards? How much time would be saved without having to make separate requests for key pharmacy metrics? With the right team members in place and a determination to streamline the sharing of KPIs, we’ve grown our reporting efforts from 70 datasets/50 dashboards to 100+ datasets/70+ dashboards across all departments.
Create impactful pharmacy dashboards
A classic pharmacy search is a standard tool that can be helpful, but also quite limiting. For example, if you run a drug search, you can view information on which account received an order and what date the order started and ended. Users then have to go through patient profiles one-by-one to extract the correct information. Creating dashboards in Expanse that are specific to our needs as a pharmacy department has helped alleviate this problem.
- PRN (medications taken as needed): PRN duplicates is our most commonly used dashboard. Before BCA, we would have to sort through patient profiles one by one and then look at all medications to see if there were any duplicate PRNs, which was a logistical nightmare. This dashboard presents the account number and the PRN reason that has been duplicated on the patient profile, so the user can simply go to that patient profile and resolve the PRN duplicate issue.
- Medication Use Evaluations: We built this dashboard for our stroke coordinator who wanted to have a weekly report sent to her for all the thrombolytic use for the past month. Previously, we scheduled a pharmacy search report to go to her printer, which would sometimes cause issues if someone took the report by accident or if the printer wasn’t working. Now, she has her web-based dashboard bookmarked and it is always up-to-date.
- Flu Vaccine Age Distribution: One of our managers wanted insight into the distribution of age for administered flu shots to know how many high dose flu vaccines needed to be ordered for the next flu season. We were able to create a report within 15 minutes, which would have been a time-consuming task without BCA and only relying on a pharmacy search report.
- Medication Scan/No Scan: We created this dashboard to share at our monthly medication safety meetings. The scan/no scan report is dynamic, allowing us to rearrange data fields without running the report multiple times. We often show scan percentages by hospital, but can also filter by unit and pull in patient location info.
- Sort By Drug: Another view we utilize is sorting by drug. This way, we have visibility into which drugs aren’t being scanned whether intentionally or due to a system error
- Sort By Site: We can also sort by facility, which reveals if certain issues are site-specific or across the whole health system
Look toward achieving process improvements
Pharmacists today are responsible for so much more than just the verification and dispensing of medications. Data visualization plays a crucial role in improving pharmacy operations and identifying trends to better serve patients. At Emanate, we’re fortunate to have a core team that meets monthly to share BCA updates and receive feedback to further achieve our goal of increasing efficiency. Leveraging a tool that delivers on our needs and can even pull in outside data (i.e. from wholesalers) has opened up many doors for data analysis not only for the pharmacy group, but the entire organization.
With easy access to actionable data, we spend less time extracting information and more time analyzing it. This maximizes integration with our care team and empowers staff with optimized workflows to support their expanding role in a new era of pharmacy.
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