Good afternoon,

 

After reviewing our Emergency Department home med delivery process and discussing the home med workload with our pharmacists that cover the UB6/ED, we are moving forward with optimizing our workflow in terms of verification and distribution of home medications in the ED. Starting tomorrow Wednesday, April 7th, home medications for the UB6/ED pharmacists will be considered low priority in terms of verification and their main focus will continue to be on the acute/critical emergency cases that arrive to the ED. The pharmacist stationed in the ED, will continue to triage their orders like normal with home medications just falling to the lowest priority in that environment. This will mirror the process with home meds/post-op orders initiated in our surgical areas to a degree. 

 

While this change is not excluding those pharmacist from verifying home medications, it is granting them the flexibility to better manage their orders when multiple codes, traumas, stroke alerts, or heart alerts are occurring throughout the night. If a patient is transferred to the floor before the UB6/ED pharmacist is able to verify the home meds, the unit based pharmacist will then be responsible for order verification of the unverified home meds. 

 

The ED department nurses have been informed they must submit a med request in order to get the home medication(s) sent from Central pharmacy (verified or unverified). Med requests for unverified home meds will signal to the pharmacist covering the ED orders to verify specific home meds during a busy time and streamline their order triage process (*Pharmacist will need to remove any med request filters they've added to exclude those requests in that area). Center console techs in Central will be instructed to leave those requests pending until the pharmacist is able to verify the order. The other unverified home meds will remain of lowest priority until the UB6/ED pharmacist is able to get to them or until they are transferred to the floor. This optimized workflow will ultimately reduce the volume of needless home meds sent to the ED and cut down on any unnecessary preparation time performed by the Central Techs/Pharmacists. Let me know if you have any questions on this new process or if any issues arise.

 

Respectfully,

Chris