Recreating the wheel: redeploying pharmacy services to improve efficiency and patient safety

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) publication To Err is Human identified medical and medication errors as a significant threat to public welfare and public health. In response to the publication the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has created the “5,000,000 lives” campaign to reduce adverse outcomes due to error. Simultaneously, the IHI has promoted it’s Triple Aim Campaign which compels health care organizations to increase the health of populations while also minimizing patient costs and enhancing the patient experience. The UPMC Presbyterian Pharmacy department is redeploying its pharmacy resources in an attempt to better contribute to the principles of the Triple Aim Campaign and improve patient safety by enhancing its technical efficiency, improving operational services, and optimizing its automation to improve medication safety.\ud The pharmacy department created service line groups that treat specific patient populations such as cardiology and neurology. These groups consist of a central pharmacist, unit-based pharmacist, and service line technician. This intervention was created to address the problem of medication delays and the lack of standardization and accountability for the provision of operational and clinical pharmacy services. Objective measures of performance include reported medication delays, missing medications, number of discharge prescriptions, and percent of total medications discharges from the automated dispensing cabinets and from the RobotRx machine. Comparison of pre-model to post-model pharmacy services showed that medication delays and missing medications decreased by 49% and 85%, respectively. \ud The pharmacy department service line model has taken measures to improve patient health by minimizing medication delays and missing medications within UPMC Presbyterian hospital. This was accomplished by stream-lining services and improving the department’s technical efficiency and patient safety surrogates measures. \u