TheraDoc®, a clinical informatics pioneer that has been helping hospitals leverage information technology to improve care for more than 10 years, today introduced a new patient safety surveillance tool to help hospitals address a recent Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal focused on reducing the possibility of patient harm associated with anticoagulation therapy.
The TheraDoc Anticoagulation Alerts package tracks the condition of patients receiving anticoagulation drug therapy to prevent blood clots, providing an early warning of potential adverse drug events or other problems. Anticoagulation therapy is a high-risk treatment, and adverse events are common due to dosing complexity and difficulties in monitoring the drugs’ safety and efficacy. The dangers of anticoagulation drugs gained extensive media coverage in 2008 after actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins received serious overdoses of a blood thinner.
The Anticoagulation Alerts package, designed for use with the TheraDoc Expert System Platform®, was created in part based on the successful use of the many TheraDoc alerts at institutions such as the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), one of the leading nonprofit health systems in the United States. The package includes more than 30 alerts from existing TheraDoc products, and 13 new alerts are scheduled for release in the Anticoagulation Alerts package in May. UPMC is an early user and an investor in TheraDoc.
According to Sue Skledar, RPh, MPH, FASHP, director of the Drug Use and Disease State Management Program at UPMC, the TheraDoc alerts play a key role in the medical center’s anticoagulation management program developed to meet the new patient safety goal. UPMC evaluated TheraDoc alerts for anticoagulation management in May 2008, and initiated the alerts as part of the pilot inpatient anticoagulation program in October 2008. Fully implemented programs had to be in place by Jan. 1, 2009, to meet the requirements.
“Many patients receive anticoagulants, so identifying those patients and providing individualized monitoring can be challenging,” Skledar said. “TheraDoc is one of our main patient safety surveillance tools used across the health system for a variety of needs, such as infection prevention and adverse drug event monitoring. Since we already had TheraDoc in place, we had a tool that could help us address the new anticoagulation requirements.”
Skledar said the TheraDoc system provides flexibility to fit into the different workflow needs of individual pharmacists and hospital pharmacy practice models, and it supports on-line intervention documentation. “TheraDoc has become the backbone of our anticoagulation program to help us quickly catch and document potential adverse events, tests that need to be ordered, or lab values that are too high or low,” she said.
According to Michael Barton, Pharm.D., TheraDoc’s senior vice president of knowledge and product development, the Anticoagulation Alerts package exemplifies the value of the TheraDoc platform. “Our flexible, robust platform helps customers address a wide range of patient safety issues daily and provides a strong, broad-reaching safety net for patients,” Barton said. “Customers appreciate the value delivered and look to the TheraDoc platform for patient safety solutions in areas as divergent as core measures compliance, anticoagulation management, screening for high-alert medications, and even flagging patients with prescription pain medication-seeking behavior.”
TheraDoc’s patented Expert System Platform receives and standardizes patient data from multiple hospital information sources. With the platform as the “engine,” TheraDoc offers a suite of Knowledge Modules that includes the Infection Control Assistant®, Antibiotic Assistant®, ADE Assistant®, and Clinical Alerts Assistant®.
Barton said the initial Anticoagulation Alerts package will be followed by a more comprehensive anticoagulation solution-the Anticoagulation Assistant™ Module-which will be in beta testing by mid-year and available to customers by year end. It will feature an expanded set of focused alerts, clinical care dashboards, and intervention documentation and compliance reporting tools designed to streamline communication among caregivers, improve clinical workflow, and enhance clinical decision making and patient safety.
About TheraDoc
Founded in 1999, TheraDoc is a clinical informatics company dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of patient care through enhanced clinical decision making. The company provides innovative products that improve clinical and financial outcomes for a range of provider and payer organizations, including some of the most respected healthcare institutions in the country such as Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and Emory Healthcare. TheraDoc’s leadership in medical informatics standards enables the exchange and use of information between disparate health information systems. The company’s founders and core medical informatics team are internationally recognized for their pioneering and continuing work in clinical decision support design and development, which spans two decades. For more information, visit theradoc.
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TheraDoc