VigiLanz Provides Efficiency Improvements, Life-Saving Interventions at Freeman Health System

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.