Pharmacy Manager Brittany Rimes (far right) with Pharmacy Hospital Information System (HIS) super users Raj Ondhia (far left), Joel Thomas, Daniel Stuckless and Martina Schubert. Niagara Health pharmacists will have more time for direct patient care with the implementation of the HIS.
Patients will have the chance to get to know Niagara Health’s pharmacists better once the Hospital Information System (HIS) goes live on Saturday.
That’s because the transition to fully digital patient recordkeeping will eliminate the need for pharmacists to spend as many as three hours a day manually transcribing orders, freeing them up for more direct patient care instead.
“The manual transcription process is a big part of our day that doesn’t require a lot of pharmacist-specific skills,” says Brittany Rimes, Pharmacy Manager at the Marotta Family Hospital. “In terms of providing more direct patient care or clinical care, our time is very limited in a day. Pharmacists are passionate about providing direct patient care.”
Often thought to be toiling behind the scenes, the 95-strong pharmacy team in St. Catharines includes frontline pharmacists working on units in clinical knowledge-based roles. They do daily rounds and grand rounds on units, process orders, and can provide patient counselling, particularly at discharge.
That latter task is something Rimes says she hopes her team members will have more time to do once the HIS is implemented and everyone hits their stride using the technology.
Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians will also have more time to consult directly with patients during their hospital stay to review Best Possible Medication History (BPMH), a process that ensures all medications patients take for chronic or acute conditions at home continue in hospital.
“We also want that history to see if any medications they are taking at home contributed to their admission,” Rimes says.
BPMH is also a key performance indicator during accreditation, which is an independent evaluation of all hospital programs and services against national standards. Niagara Health received exemplary standing – the highest-possible level of accreditation – for the third consecutive time during the most recent evaluation by Accreditation Canada earlier this year.
Additionally, the shift to the HIS will provide caregivers greater opportunity to ask questions of pharmacists on their loved one’s care teams and be educated about medications that need to continue at home after discharge. This access to pharmacists will extend to patients without caregivers, too, Rimes notes.
“With the HIS being one system, with Dialysis using it, Oncology using it, Women’s and Babies using it, Neonatal Intensive Care using it, information will all be in one place, which will hopefully free us up more to provide value-added pharmacy services."
“Medications are very overwhelming for a lot of people so having some counselling being done before they leave the hospital, and ideally with the pharmacist who attended to their loved one’s care while they were here, can be massively helpful,” she says. “They can get clarification before they leave because trying to ask questions after they leave can be really challenging.”
Niagara Health’s pharmacists currently rely on a handful of different platforms to do their jobs: one to receive medication orders, one to enter orders, and some third-party apps for other requirements.
Some patient information that Rimes and her team rely on may also be scanned into the record system – a process that can take days. Once those notes are available for review, pharmacists have to spend extensive amounts of time combing through them in search of specific details.
It’s a cumbersome patchwork that will be streamlined with the HIS, which will increase accuracy and efficiency of care to improve health outcomes.
“Right now, you have to be cognizant of where you’re typing and looking and you may have to look at six or seven places at once for information,” she says. “With the HIS being one system, with Dialysis using it, Oncology using it, Women’s and Babies using it, Neonatal Intensive Care using it, information will all be in one place, which will hopefully free us up more to provide value-added pharmacy services.
“We all benefit from the HIS but we have concrete, measurable benefits,” she adds. “Pharmacy is a small world and we all have friends in other hospitals who’ve gone through the transition to an HIS and it’s all been very positive.”
