DrFirst

The Power of Partnership: Advancing Medication Management Through Collaboration

Adopting new technology can be alternately thrilling and terrifying: Was it the right choice? Will it work as promised? What if it’s hard to implement and use? People ask themselves these questions when buying a new smartphone—imagine the concerns when adopting new technology for an entire health system, where the financial and operational stakes are far higher.

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) is dedicated to easing this process and advancing the use of technology to improve care for everyone. The non-profit organization stresses the synergy between healthcare provider executives and select IT vendors as essential to fostering innovation and moving the industry forward. Recently, CHIME recognized the successful collaboration of two leading health systems with DrFirst to optimize medication management in ways that improve efficiency and patient care.

Saving Clinicians 19,000 Hours of Data Entry per Year

As health systems merge patient records across multiple hospitals or transition to enterprise-wide Epic electronic health record (EHR) systems, the migration of data is crucial. Because without accurate information at the point of care, clinicians can’t make informed decisions.

Before 2022, Baptist Health of Jacksonville, Florida, used multiple EHR systems across six hospitals and more than 200 primary care and specialty physician practices. CHIME member and Chief Digital and Information Officer Aaron Miri detailed how his team consolidated EHRs and created one comprehensive patient record across the Baptist Health system.

“Naturally, our goal was to implement an effective instance of Epic that would aid clinician decision-making and improve patient outcomes,” he said. “Medication management is a critical component of providing quality care across the continuum. When accurate medication data isn’t readily available to clinicians at the point of care, patients often become a source of truth—an often unreliable way to gather data that can lead to adverse drug events (ADEs).”

Baptist Health partnered with DrFirst to eliminate these challenges and improve medication management by consolidating patient data in a single Epic EHR platform. Specifically, the Baptist Health and DrFirst teams wanted to:

• Improve patient care and clinical decision-making by sharing medication history information across care settings
• Automate the transfer of data from legacy EHRs, using AI to pre-populate prescription instructions (known as “sigs”) into discrete fields in Epic
• Increase operational efficiency by spending less time gathering and manually entering data

Baptist Health shared some of the results with CHIME:

“From our Epic go-live on July 30, 2022, through July 30, 2023, we have converted 9,102,472 medication sigs without clinician intervention using DrFirst’s medication management solutions. A subset of these conversions had no sig provided in third-party data, and the sig was inferred by the AI technology. Another subset had a sig available, but only in free-text form, and Epic converted these to a discretely defined sig in the database. Prior to the EHR consolidation and integration of DrFirst solutions, clinicians would have been responsible for manually converting all 9,102,472 medication sigs, which would have included more than 87.7 million sig transactions. By avoiding this conversion, Baptist Health saved critical time (estimated at more than 19,000 hours) for our clinicians and reduced the likelihood of transcription errors.”

Read the full story to learn how Baptist Health is also streamlining prescription renewals and boosting patient adherence to medications.

Gaining a 202% Improvement in Importing of Clean Prescription Data

Reducing manual processes is also a hot topic at Gundersen Health System, a Wisconsin-based healthcare provider that operates 11 hospitals in four states. To improve operational efficiencies, the health system launched a project to integrate intelligent automation within its Epic EHR in hopes of decreasing administrative burdens, improving workflows, and freeing clinicians from administrative tasks. Better medication management and reducing clinician burnout were also top priorities.

Praveen Chopra, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Gundersen, related to CHIME how his team collaborated with DrFirst, Epic, and Surescripts (a pharmacy software vendor) to test, implement, and measure the flow of medication data across the various platforms and interfaces. Once a new AI-powered DrFirst solution was certified by Surescripts, the health system deployed it to fill gaps in medication data as it’s transmitted across incompatible systems.

“Prior to implementing the new solution, we had up to 1,000 unmapped sigs per day being assigned to our pharmacy informaticists, making sig-mapping an unmanageable task,” he said. “With DrFirst, we’ve reduced that number to about 100 unmapped sigs, 90% of which are complex medications that can’t be completely mapped. This has saved our pharmacy informatics team significant time, decreasing administrative as well as clinical burdens. After the implementation, we saw a 202% improvement in the number of clean sigs imported, resulting in 84% of incoming prescription renewal data either partially or fully populated in the EHR.”

Read the story in CHIME to see more ways Gundersen is relieving staff from manual processes and embracing automation.

Collaboration is Key

At DrFirst, we understand that our job is not only to deliver technology but also to identify what makes each client unique so that their challenges are addressed, and their goals achieved. That’s why we work closely with hospitals and health systems before, during, and after implementation to make sure the solutions we deliver are tailored to your needs, integrated into your EHR and other systems, and tuned for peak efficiency.