While the healthcare professionals surveyed rated their satisfaction with their current medication safety screening solution when using basic patient data (such as age, weight, or gender) at a 6.4 out of 10, that number dipped to 4.9 when respondents were asked to consider how well their solution uses more advanced patient data. Many noted that one of their biggest causes of frustration with their solution was the lack of personalized, precision screening that took into account additional patient factors such as:
What do clinicians look for in their tools?
Patient safety was the primary reason clinicians surveyed — whether from Mexico, South America, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, or Australia — offered for why they valued medication screening tools. The top three most valuable benefits of medication screening cited by respondents were:
- Improved patient safety and quality of care
- Information within workflow to improve decision making
- Time-saving and workflow efficiency
When asked to rate how important certain factors were in selecting the right medication screening solution, respondents selected their top criteria and scored them on a scale of 0-5:
- Content quality: 4.6
- Workflow optimization (or alerts appearing at the right place, right time): 4.03
- Patient-centric alerts: 4.01
- Frequency of content updates: 3.6
- Granularity of drug information: 3.4
- Visionary vendor: 2.87
Are you ready for the next generation of healthcare IT?
Medication screening solutions are evolving and maturing to adapt to the needs of modern healthcare.
- A first-generation solution allows for basic screening, but it does not connect to patient data for personalized alerts, nor does it provide alerts at key moments within the workflow.
- A second-generation solution will add in minimal patient data and moderate drug information granularity to increase precision.
- With a more developed third-generation solution, you see more sophisticated data allowing for greater alert precision and efficiency of feedback.
- It isn’t until the fourth generation of development that medication decision support delivers more advanced and granular drug and patient data, the latest available evidence, efficient just-in-time alerting, and analytic insights to optimize impact.
Of the clinicians surveyed who had already implemented medication screening, the largest percentage — 44% — were comfortable that they were using an advanced third-generation solution. Only 8% reported that they had a fully developed fourth-generation medication decision support solution.
Even so, 21% said that they were still using a first-generation solution. Without the decision support clinicians need at the time, place, and level of sophistication they are seeking, many health systems find that the challenges of reducing errors and lessening demands on the workforce are exacerbated.
Taking the steps to upgrade a health system’s medication decision support system and workflow integration can have a lasting positive effect on clinician experience and on resulting care quality and outcomes.
See how one teaching hospital helped reduce medication errors and relieved pressure on staff with Medi-Span® Clinical APIs medication decision support.
