Healthprolink: How long have you been using Quantifi?
Suzanne: Since May of last year, so just over 1 year.
Healthprolink: How many pharmacists use Quantifi at St. Rita’s?
Suzanne: We have about 25, including both full-time and part-time pharmacists.
Healthprolink: I know that you were the one person in charge of setting up Quantifi at St. Rita’s. What was setup like for you?
Suzanne: The setup was very, very easy. All of the tutorials that are available are excellent and anytime that I have ever had a question, I’ve always gotten a very prompt response. Just the other day, I emailed my Account Manager with a question and almost instantaneously I received a response. We’ve been very impressed with the level of service.
Healthprolink: Were you using a different method in the past to document your clinical interventions?
Suzanne: Yes, we were capturing some of our data on paper and then inputting it into a very basic Excel® spreadsheet. We didn’t keep track of as many interventions as we do now. We used a lot of tick marks. We had no idea of the amount of time people were spending on clinical interventions or the types of drugs they were dealing with. It didn’t contain a lot of detail.
Healthprolink: What do you like most about Quantifi?
Suzanne: I like the data we get on reports. Our director uses the time and cost savings data from Quantifi as partial justification for our McKesson HBOC dispensing robot. Several years ago when we got the robot, part of our justification for purchasing it was that we could do other clinical activities with the time we were saving from dispensing. So now we can use the data from Quantifi to truly show what we are doing now with that extra time and the cost savings we are making in other areas. Even though we purchased Quantifi several years after the robot, we use the data for our continued justification of the purchase. Also, the clinical activities that we are doing now truly improve patient care, so the benefit is not just in the cost savings.
Healthprolink: Have you looked at our new Quick Intervention Documentation feature?
Suzanne: Yes we have and all the pharmacists here love it. They’re using it for little things that eat up their time here and there but are too small to require a whole intervention form. Basic drug information questions that don’t require research are one example. They tally up the number of times a day these were asked and estimate the time it took and put it into Quantifi using the Quick Documentation form in a batch entry. The pharmacists were very excited when I showed them the new feature. We’re very excited about using it.
Healthprolink: Are you using the follow-up feature in Quantifi?
Suzanne: Yes we are. Especially for things like our IV-to-PO program and our renal monitoring program. Anytime we make recommendations in either of these areas, the information is put in Quantifi as a follow-up. The next day another pharmacist views all of the outstanding follow-ups and follows through with those interventions.
Healthprolink: Do you access Quantifi on a handheld device as well as the website?
Suzanne: Our staff pharmacists use the website because they are on the desktop computer all day. Our clinical pharmacy staff uses the Palm mostly. Personally, I use the Palm for 90% of my documentation.
Healthprolink: How do you compare the ease-of-use on the Palm compared to the website?
Suzanne: We all have different opinions. I can think of one clinical pharmacist who loves documenting on his Palm and never uses the website because he’s on the go and on the run. When I’m up doing rounds, the team can be talking about a patient and I can be standing there entering an intervention on my Palm. It makes my life a lot easier. I don’t have to remember to come down and document on the website later in the day. When I’m on the go, I love my Palm. That said, when I’m out in the main pharmacy or in my office, I document on the website. I find that it is faster on the website overall with fewer screens and faster entry on the keyboard as opposed to writing notes with the graffiti pad. So there is a trade off.
Healthprolink: Besides using the data from Quantifi to justify your pharmacy robot, are there other ways that you use Quantifi Management Reports?
Suzanne: One of the things we have started to do recently is use Quantifi reports as part of overall pharmacist performance evaluations. For instance, have the number of interventions documented for a given pharmacist decreased or increased over time. If someone has decreased, we will explore options for them to increase the amount of clinical work they are doing. We also use the data to learn more about the types of interventions we are doing and see where the majority of our workload is besides dispensing.
Healthprolink: Have you been surprised by any of the data you have seen in your Management Reports?
Suzanne: Really the main surprise was the volume of clinical work being done by pharmacy staff. It’s surprising to see how many questions the pharmacy is answering; people call us all day. It’s also great that we can document when we attend codes in Quantifi as that eats up a lot of our time. When you can show that you had attended an above average number of codes for a given time period that can help explain why things might not be going as smoothly as normal in the pharmacy.
Healthprolink: Have you customized Quantifi to meet any specific needs at your facility?
Suzanne: Well, we do have a transitional care facility here, which is a 30 day stay nursing home. As a requirement for accreditation, we must do routine medication reviews on these patients. We have one pharmacist working in that area who keeps track of her recommendations for these patients all in Quantifi. All of the data that she collects is pulled out separately from Quantifi and gets presented to the Nursing Manager to document that we are in compliance as this facility is accredited separately from the hospital.
Healthprolink: What types of interventions are being done in your transitional care facility?
Suzanne: Basically for our accreditation, we must make certain we follow all of the appropriate guidelines; for instance, making sure that patients aren’t receiving certain drugs, doing patient medication histories, drug/lab interactions to name a few. So the pharmacist that works in this area is focused on doing those interventions to meet our accreditation guidelines. An example is if a patient is on more than one drug that causes sedation and it puts the patient at a fall risk, the pharmacist will intervene and recommend that they pare those drugs down. When accreditation surveyors come to the facility, we will be able to give them documentation of our involvement in patient care.
Healthprolink: Are there any other examples of ways you use Quantifi at St. Rita’s you would like to share?
Suzanne: We have two pharmacists that work in a nurse-managed Heart Failure Clinic. We do a lot of dosing adjustments for these patients per drug therapy consults. We commonly titrate doses of patients’ beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, diuretics, and potassium for instance. We work on a consult basis with the physician. The pharmacist that works there full time saves $6000-$7000 per month just in interventions for those patients.
Healthprolink: Suzanne, thank you for taking the time today for this interview.
Suzanne: My pleasure.