“The award really added prestige to our Department of Pharmacy,” says Lynn Boecler, Pharm.D., Senior Director of Pharmacy Services for Evanston Hospital, and the leader of NorthShore University Hospital HealthSystem’s winning multidisciplinary team. “The hospital’s Board of Directors recognized that this was an achievement by the pharmacy department.”
NorthShore was selected as the 2005 recipient for implementing a unique electronic health record system in the acute care and ambulatory settings – one of the first healthcare systems to do so. The team spent more than a year planning, preparing and training NorthShore’s healthcare professionals for the new system, and another 15 months implementing it in 3 hospitals and more than 60 physician offices and off-site locations. |
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The electronic medication record (EMR) system made it possible for all practitioners to work from a single, integrated source of clinical information that is secure, current, legible, organized and instantly accessible.
“The EMR continues to reduce certain types of medication errors,” says Stan Kent, M.S., FASHP, Assistant Vice President of Pharmacy Services. “Our nurses now use it to double-check certain high-risk medications, and we are starting to use more intelligent alerts. It helps in the medication reconciliation process by allowing physicians to create accurate orders and medication lists for patients to take home with them.”
“We were recognized for the work of implementing the basic system and getting it up and running, but we’ve been building on it ever since,” explains Boecler. “The EMR now helps identify which patients need a pharmacist’s extra attention that day, based on their status and lab results as delivered by the EMR. It basically streamlines our healthcare workers’ day, because all of this crucial information about each patient is automatically pushed to them. It allows them to spend more time on direct patient care rather than paperwork.”
Boecler’s team chose to use the monetary award to fund a partial additional position for a year within the pharmacy department to work exclusively with the EMR system. “We really wanted someone dedicated to learning all of the nuances of the EMR and the other ways in which we could use it to make improvements.”
The team found that even the process of applying or the award was a valuable experience. “That process gave us the basis for our argument that the pharmacy department needed additional resources,” says Boecler. “After being named a finalist, we went through a site visit, and that was very re-enforcing. To have judges who are experts in the field of medication-use safety come here, evaluate us, and tell us that we were doing all the right things was very encouraging and affirming for us.”
Watch a video highlighting the 2005 winner and finalists.