Tag: Pharmacy

Andy Williams, PharmD, BCPP, BCGP, Senior Clinical Pharmacist at Riverside University Health System, discusses how VigiLanz improves patient care.

“I’ve seen VigiLanz make some very strong, important interventions, especially in the realm of our pharmacokinetic monitoring,” says Williams, adding that VigiLanz serves as a second set of eyes for pharmacists.

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

Transcript:

I think the biggest benefit that VigiLanz provides for patient care is that it helps us work more efficiently, so we’re able to quickly get the information that we need, so that we can spend more time out on treatment team rounds or out directly interacting with patients on the unit  conducting our pharmacist-led patient education groups. It helps us to take care of any reports or lab monitoring we need to do quickly and efficiently, so that we’re able to then realign our time on something else that could help strengthen patient care.

Since we are a psychiatric hospital, we may have a little bit unique methods in which we use VigiLanz. We use VigiLanz largely for our reports, so it’s able to help us with conducting our quality assurance measures. We’re able to run reports on which patients have received long-acting injectable anti-psychotics each quarter, and then cross compare that with their readmission rates. We’re able to use it to run our Joint Commission Hospital-Based Inpatient Psychiatric Services measures to see patients that are on two or more anti-psychotics. We’re able to use it to run whether or not they have appropriate labs, so if they have their lipid panels or their A1Cs for the patients that are receiving second generation antipsychotics, as well as for pharmacokinetic monitoring of Lithium or valproic acid sodium. 

I’ve seen VigiLanz make some very strong, important interventions, especially in the realm of our pharmacokinetic monitoring. Many of our patients are receiving Lithium, which is a narrow therapeutic index drug, and with that, it has the potential for many drug interactions. It could be very easy for one of our pharmacists to overlook a lab or not see an out-of-range lab. VigiLanz is able to provide that safety net and that second look of eyes to alert us in real time if something is out of range so that we can act quickly, without leaving the patient exposed to a higher level or risk them receiving another dose when that really isn’t appropriate.”

Adrienne Carey, PharmD, BCPS, Clinical Pharmacist at Freeman Health System, discusses how VigiLanz improves efficiency and helps saves patients’ lives.

“VigiLanz impacts our efficiency because it shows us what we need to intervene on in real time,” says Carey. “We use our health information system also, but we are pretty much living in the VigiLanz system because it’s real time.”

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

VigiLanz impacts our efficiency because it shows us what we need to intervene on in real time. So we use, especially our clinical pharmacists on the floor, we live in the VigiLanz software. We use our health information system also, but we are pretty much living in the VigiLanz system because it’s real time. We use it for our medication reconciliation program, so our technicians use it to document all the information that they gather when compiling the patient’s home medication list. We also use it for our clinical pharmacists and our staff pharmacists throughout our system to document all of our activities to help us identify patients that might need some type of intervention from a pharmacist, whether it’s dosing or looking at their IV status or whether we can switch their medications from IV to PO. We look at their antibiotic usage to make sure that we’re covering their bugs appropriately.

We have seen VigiLanz help us identify life-saving interventions for our pharmacy department. For example, we have a rule to help us identify those that are on anticoagulants that have been discontinued or put on hold. So typically when you are on anticoagulants, that’s not something that’s put on hold and then stopped indefinitely; that’s usually something that’s temporarily put on hold and then we really need to resume it after your procedure or after whatever surgery we’re doing or test we’re doing is done. So it has helped us identify those people who it’s been put on hold but somehow it got missed putting back on. Without the anticoagulation, we run the risk of heart attacks, and strokes, and things like that, so the rules that help us find those patients who were on it but for some reason are no longer on it have been very important.

My favorite part of working with VigiLanz has honestly been the customer support. So we have a person on the VigiLanz side on the customer support team that I can submit a ticket to at any moment and they are experts and they are wonderful at getting back to me very quickly and helping me work through whatever issue it is. I’m kind of a do-it-yourself person, so I usually try to create the rules or fix things that I want for our system, but sometimes I come to a roadblock and I usually submit a ticket and the pharmacist on their end has been absolutely wonderful to work with. That’s not something I’ve ever had with any software program I’ve used before.

Jill Bennett, PharmD, BCPS, Clinical Coordinator/Residency Program Director at Antelope Valley Hospital, discusses how VigiLanz has transformed work flows, and is helping staff members work smarter, not harder.

“Certainly the information that you put in more than represents what you can get out of it and the benefit it can add,” she says. “You can get to so much more than you can utilizing manual reporting.”

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

Transcribed video:

On a day to day basis, VigiLanz really drives our work. It’s changed the way we work. We work smarter, not harder, and we’ve been able to really increase what we’re looking at. So, initially what we had to do manually by generating reports and looking at things like certain medications that were given intravenously that could be changed to oral therapy, we instead were able to have it filter through and look at whether or not the patient was on other oral medications, maybe was eating, those types of things that would let us get in tune to the changes that we could make more quickly.

It really drives our work flow. We have the alerts, that’s part of it. Another piece, is certainly our antimicrobial stewardship work. We utilize the antimicrobial stewardship list, and it’s really nice to be able to focus in on which patients need to be seen that are stewardship patients and then actually to be able to check them off and note when we’ve done the follow-up or when we’ve made the needed interventions. So things like drug-bug mismatches, being able to de-escalate therapy when we have those final culture results in, things like that.

I’ve been a real proponent of VigiLanz. I mean I always feel very comfortable in recommending it to other healthcare systems and I feel really lucky that we have this available to us because there certainly are a lot of people that want it and have not been able to justify it in the right way maybe to their administration.

Certainly the information that you put in more than represents what you can get out of it and the benefit it can add. You can get to so much more than you can utilizing manual reporting. So you do work smarter, you can get too many more things, and therefore you use your resources more wisely. It’s been really beneficial to us.