A couple of days ago I wrote about The California Antimicrobial Stewardship Program Initiative, and how it’s an opportunity for pharmacists to get out and stretch their clinical legs.
Antimicrobial stewardship requires a lot of real-time surveillance and monitoring of patients, labs and cultures, medication use, and so on. There are basically two ways to accomplish this. One is tedious and inefficient, while the other is smart and efficient.
The tedious, inefficient method is the one used by many healthcare facilities. Pharmacies in these facilities simply throw pharmacists at the problem by having them look at a bunch of patients manually every day in search of anomalies. It’s very time consuming. It’s like looking for a crooked needle in a needle stack.
The smart, efficient method involves the use of clinical decision support systems. These systems are connected to several data feeds from other systems throughout the hospital, such as ADT, pharmacy, lab, and so on. The data is aggregated and analyzed against a set of rules designed to find patients with potential problems. These patients are tagged and referred to a pharmacist for follow up, i.e. the pharmacists are only presented with the crooked needles. It’s a much better way to go about things.
There are several systems on the market designed to perform real-time surveillance and clinical decision support. The list below includes many, but is certainly not exhaustive.