HealthJuly 20, 2022|UpdatedOctober 24, 2024

St. Dominic Hospital improves patient safety, pharmacy cost savings, and antimicrobial stewardship efforts

To identify cost savings opportunities, the St. Dominic’s pharmacy team wanted to take a multi-disciplinary approach to decrease pharmacy costs for the hospital and improve patient experience.

Pharmacy challenge: Decrease pharmacy costs

St. Dominic-Jackson Memorial Hospital (St. Dominic Hospital) is a 571-bed acute care facility in Jackson, Miss., tracing its history back 75+ years. St Dominic Hospital includes the acute care hospital, a continuing care community, and a full range of outpatient and community services. To identify cost savings opportunities, St. Dominic pharmacy team wanted to take a multi-disciplinary approach to decrease pharmacy costs for the hospital and improve patient experience.

After conducting a pharmacy budget assessment and identifying that chemotherapy and biologic agents were increasing the budget exponentially, the pharmacy team set out to identify areas to improve spend and measure and optimize the acute care pharmacy’s contribution to clinically appropriate cost savings.

How St. Dominic utilized Sentri7 for drug spend

St. Dominic’s clinical pharmacy team has used Wolters Kluwer’s Sentri7® solution for more than a decade. When this cost-savings initiative began in 2015, the team used Sentri7’s turnkey, evidence-based Medication Management rules to establish a set of alerts and metrics to strengthen the pharmacy’s impact on the hospital’s key initiatives, including its management of drug spend.

Key priorities from the beginning were managing costs associated with chemotherapy and biologic agents that were significantly impacting the acute care pharmacy budget. With the support of the C-suite, oncologists, and patients, pharmacy teams looked to St. Dominic’s outpatient infusion center for medication administration. When it was realized that many patients could receive medications from the outpatient infusion center within one to two days of being discharged, the team discovered that they would prevent two to three doses of medication from being administered in the hospital. This new process improved patient satisfaction and allowed for increased reimbursement in the outpatient setting, decreased waste, and decreased nursing administration time.

“With Sentri7 we set up alerts so that as an alert would fire, an email would be sent to the pharmacist,” said Katie Schipper, PharmD, Clinical Pharmacist, St. Dominic Hospital. “Then the pharmacist would consult with the physician, and orders were sent to ambulatory infusion centers. Not only did this provide our facility with significant cost savings but it also provided cost savings to the patient.”

St. Dominic’s rapidly adopted Sentri7’s evidence-based, clinically-trusted rules and intervention workflows, allowing the pharmacy team to quickly intervene and adjust therapies as needed. Pharmacy workflows are driven through Sentri7’s robust dashboard, where the pharmacy team can access key patient information from the EHR and suggest actions that drive standardization and improve productivity.

The pharmacy team accessed Sentri7’s extensive content library and was also able to quickly build rules that met the needs of the facility and bolstered the success of the cost-savings initiative.

With Sentri7, we’re in control. We’re able to quickly adopt evidence-based guidance into practice yet can easily make changes to our rules in a matter of minutes. This allows us to be nimble, make adjustments quickly to meet our protocols, and not wait on other teams to help facilitate these changes.
Katie Schipper, PharmD, Clinical Pharmacist, St. Dominic Hospital 

Decreased pharmacy spend and improved patient satisfaction  

Through its use of Sentri7, St. Dominic decreased pharmacy spend, increased team collaboration, and improved patient satisfaction. “The support of our leadership, oncologists, and patients was instrumental” said Schipper. “This support, combined with the teamwork across nursing, physician, and pharmacy teams, allowed us to optimize our workflow and improve our patients’ experience."

Through this initiative, the St. Dominic team achieved impressive results with managing costs associated with high-cost therapies:

  • When targeting bevacizumab in 2016, the team at St. Dominic’s achieved an estimated $30,000 in cost savings within the first 30 days.
  • A shift in their efforts in 2017 to focusing on the addition of paclitaxel and rituximab, added an additional estimated $22K in cost savings. 
  • A pharmacist-led initiative to convert intravenous levothyroxine daily orders to an adjusted extended-day administration. By capturing the initial order in real time, pharmacists could be proactive with their colleagues, saving approximately $40,000 annually.
  • The team utilized Sentri7 to help identify all patients on nicardipine infusions. Pharmacists then managed patient blood pressure medications, decreasing nicardipine expenditures by about $30,000 per month. The close monitoring and identification of patients receiving nicardipine infusions enabled appropriate dosing and titrations as well as adherence to hospital protocols resulting in an average annualized savings of $360,000.

St. Dominic's leveraged Sentri7’s robust analytics platform to transform data into actionable insights, track key metrics, and increase the pharmacy team’s performance.

With Sentri7’s Analytics, we’re able to track and create transparency for cost savings, helping us identify where we’re seeing key wins and opportunities. We can easily share this with key stakeholders and use our findings to support pharmacy staffing needs.
Katie Schipper, PharmD, Clinical Pharmacist, St. Dominic Hospital 

Showcasing the value of the St. Dominic pharmacy team 

St. Dominic’s pharmacy team was so successful in this initiative, that it lasted four years, concluding in 2019 after achieving a change in the culture of prescribing inpatient chemotherapy and biologics and reaching their cost savings goal.

Not only is the St. Dominic’s team using Sentri7 to identify cost savings opportunities, but they continue to utilize Sentri7 in other ways including aggressively preventing and monitoring adverse drug reactions, improving Antimicrobial Stewardship efforts, and ensuring the safety of their patients receiving anticoagulation therapy.

“With Sentri7, we were able to showcase the value of our pharmacy team and make deep impacts shortly after implementation. We are given the tools needed to be successful and can drive initiatives and make changes quickly and with ease".

Access The Case Study
Stacey-McCoy
Pharmacy Clinical Program Manager

Dr. Stacey McCoy has over 20 years of experience as a clinical pharmacist. Her most recent clinical practice included more than 12 years of experience as an adult emergency medicine specialist.

Back To Top