Intelligent Hospital Association recognizes Ochsner with Best Comprehensive Integration award

The Intelligent Hospital Association today announced that Ochsner Health System was awarded the Best Comprehensive Integration for 2014. The award is given to a hospital or health system that effectively and seamlessly integrates technologies to provide a comprehensive solution in a health care facility.

Ochsner envisioned a system in which pharmacists focused more on direct patient care, technician-managed drug preparation and distribution, and advanced technologies to help improve medication management, patient safety, quality of care, productivity and cost-effectiveness. Staff from the nursing, pharmacy and information technology (IT) departments from across the system worked together to review available technology and determine the best system-wide solution to support this vision. The multidisciplinary team determined that the Pyxis^® ES system offered a way to help achieve their vision through standardization, enhanced connectivity and web-based applications. The Pyxis^® Enterprise Server enables data sharing between ES platform technologies and health information technology systems, giving clinicians the data they need for safer, more reliable medication management.

"Our vision started with the patient and how to create a medication management system that was safer and easier to manage," said Deborah Simonson, assistant vice president of Pharmacy, Ochsner Health System. "The combination of the Pyxis ES system and the collaborative partnership between Pharmacy, Nursing and Information Technology was critical to our success for both user needs assessment and new process adoption. Most importantly, the Pharmacy IT lead was critical to understanding nurses' needs and simplifying what end users would see when they navigate medication administration workflows."

The Active Directory capabilities of the Pyxis ES system allows for greater centralization of user management for the health system. Ochsner was also able to standardize its formulary into one common formulary across the full health system through integration between the Pyxis ES system and the pharmacy information system.

Pharmacy and IT can now more easily manage and configure the entire system to improve medication safety and efficiency, which ultimately reduces costs. Having a Pharmacy Informatics lead was critical to understanding nurses' needs and simplifying what end users would see while navigating medication administration workflows to achieve a successful implementation. Most importantly, the added safety and efficiency of the new Pyxis ES system allows pharmacists and clinicians to focus more attention on their most important role—caring for patients.

The award was presented at the Healthcare Information Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference being held April 12 – 16 in Chicago. Accepting the award on behalf of Ochsner Health System was Christopher Entwisle, RPh, IT pharmacy manager, Ann Lockhart, RN, MN, assistant vice president of Clinical Transformation and Informatics and Ginger Schnell, Pharmacy IT lead.

SOURCE Ochsner Health System