Moore and other executives at the critical access facility ultimately concluded that the most cost-effective approach would be to adopt bar coding. So the hospital spent about $100,000 worth of donations to help pay for the technology. In addition, it negotiated a special deal with the vendor, IntelliDOT Corp., San Diego, to pay off the remaining balance over a five-month period.
The hospital had been using a Pyxis drug dispensing cabinet from Cardinal Health, Dublin, Ohio, for several years. “But we had been noticing a trend that nurses were not documenting the drugs they were pulling from the cabinet in our handwritten records,” says Jean Abeita, director of pharmacy.
The hospital lacks a clinical information system, so it’s using the IntelliDOT technology to create what amounts to a basic, freestanding electronic medication administration record. “It’s very costly to purchase an electronic medical records system, and we aren’t at the point where we’re able to do it yet,” says Lisa Thompson, director of nursing.
Nurses now use the dispensing cabinet to retrieve a unit-dose of a drug for an inpatient, making selections on the cabinet’s computer screen. Then they use a small hand-held computer from IntelliDOT to scan a bar code on the patient’s wristband, scan a bar code on the drug and scan their identification badge to confirm the right drug is being administered. These bar coding steps create a computerized clinical record of all medications that a patient receives.
“You have to spend time figuring out what will work best for your hospital,” Thompson says. For tiny Hiawatha, the low-cost approach using hand-held devices was a logical starting-point.
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