JOPLIN, Mo. — Keeping an eye on every patient in the hospital is more than a full time job. But some digital help is making sure patients are getting the smallest effective dose and steering clear of infections.
Adrienne Carey, Clinical Pharmacist, said, “It’s a data mining software program that we use in the pharmacy, our inpatient pharmacy, and it looks at all our in patients in the hospital.”
It’s called Vigilanz and it keeps tracks of important trends in drugs, dosage, and kidney function.
“It brings all those stuff to our attention in real time, there’s rules we build to help us catch some of those scenarios that we want to know about so we can intervene in a timely fashion.”
Before Vigilanz, it was a manual process.
“We would run a report out of our health info system to get a list of patients that are on a list of drugs and after that we would go into each electronic medical record or paper chart and dig to find what is their kidney function, is this the right dose for them, is this the right antibiotic for them, have they been vaccinated?”
Vigilanz can play a role in a wide range of cases, including the pandemic.
Jessica Liberty, Freeman Infection Prev.,said, “Covid is one of our activations we have a rule built in for that.”
Preventing infection is another role that Vigilanz helps with.
“You can imagine — we have 250 – 300 patients every day.”
Gathering that information and flagging areas of potential concern, helping patients get better and get home
