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.
