Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, has achieved wide adoption of an electronic bar-coding system that verifies medication delivery is correct before pediatric patients receive it. The organization’s story is featured in an in-depth case study, “Changing the Culture: One Hospital’s Journey to Improve Care Delivery with Bedside Medication Verification,” developed by CHIME.
Careful planning and ongoing support and attention to how clinicians are using the technology have resulted in widespread use of the bedside medication verification system, according to the report. Executives at Cook Children’s state that more than 97 percent of medications and patients are scanned before patients receive treatment.
Beginning in November 2010, Cook Children’s implemented a bedside medication verification system to prevent variances in drug administration.
To implement the new system, an implementation team was formed with participants from a variety of departments within the hospital, including various nursing leaders, the pharmacy department and IT. The team worked together to map out a phased implementation in the 428-bed facility, and then a strategy to use data to encourage the bar-coding system as they treated every patient. That core group continues to meet, more than a year after implementation of the technology, to enable maintenance of the program and continuous improvement in the process.
While bearing responsibility for the installation of the technology, Cook Children’s IT department was at the table to enable the project, but not to lead it, said Theresa Meadows, a CHIME member and SVP/CIO for Cook Children’s Health Care System. “It wasn’t an IT project,” Meadows said. “It was driven by the clinicians, and that made a huge difference.”
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