Real-time Antimicrobial Stewardship Improves Care at Intermountain Healthcare

Laurie Blankenship, PharmD, Pharmacy Director at Park City Hospital of Intermountain Healthcare, discusses the benefits of working with VigiLanz on a daily basis.

“I can remember five years ago, when we didn’t have VigiLanz or any kind of software for antimicrobial stewardship, and we didn’t have nearly as many good catches and we didn’t make nearly as many interventions,” says Blankenship.

Watch this short video to learn more about how Blankenship and her team are using VigiLanz to improve patient care.

Transcript:

I am the pharmacy director at Park City Hospital, which is one of the 23 hospitals at Intermountain Healthcare. It’s a community hospital, so it’s a little bit smaller. We only have 37 beds. Because of the size, I’m more of a working director. So I do a lot of clinical work. I do work with VigiLanz on a daily basis. I’m the co-chair of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Committee that we have at Park City Hospital.

I can remember five years ago when we didn’t have VigiLanz or any kind of software for antimicrobial stewardship and we didn’t have nearly as many good catches and we didn’t make nearly as many interventions.

VigiLanz helps keep us up to date on any cultures or results. So it’s the real time feature—so important because it gives us all that feedback right when it’s currently happening. Instead of looking through the medical chart and trying to find those blood cultures or the urine cultures, VigiLanz gives us that real time data. So it allows us to make more appropriate antibiotic choices, shortened duration of therapy, identify if there’s a bug drug mismatch and even identify discharged patients, which is a really big thing that we use it for. If the patient went home and their culture grew something that we need to change therapy, it’s a great tool for identifying those patients that are already out of our system.

My favorite part of working with VigiLanz is that we have all the information in one portal for antimicrobial stewardship. It includes our emergency room, it includes our ICU, it includes our med-surg, and all of it, again, is in real time. We have all that at our fingertips and an easily accessible tool to help us make the best decisions and to help us tailor and recommend, make awesome recommendations to physicians and to improve patient care. That’s the most important thing.