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Client hospitals applaud telepharmacy benefits

Nurse Leader Weekly, June 5, 2003

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Telepharmacy is a new way for hospitals to safely dispense medication to patients when the pharmacy is closed. At facilities that use telepharmacy, nurses fax medication orders to offsite pharmacists after hours, who then review and approve orders.

At Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, both the pharmacy and nursing staff report satisfaction with their telepharmacy system, provided by MedNovations Inc., a health care solutions company in Greenbelt, MD.

"[Nurses] don't have a delay in treatment in terms of waiting for the on-call pharmacist to respond to any type of inquiry," says Jamie Belcastro, RPh, Sibley's pharmacy operations manager. "When [nurses] fax over a response to MedNovations, the response is relatively instant. So it's almost like having their own in-house pharmacy."

Other benefits include the following, according to Christopher Keeys, PharmD, BCPS, RPh, MedNovations chief executive officer:

• Nurses report high satisfaction with the fact that MedNovations pharmacists contact physicians directly if there is a problem with their order
  
  
• Nursing administrators say they are pleased with the level of review that exceeds what their nurses could do (Keeys and his staff have the pharmacy profile to screen against for drug interactions, allergies, and dosing). Nurse administrators say that in the past they were uncomfortable being the ones that had to do that review.
  
  
• Medication errors have decreased.
  
  
• Administrators no longer have to fight for staff to work extra hours with the current pharmacist shortage.
  
  
• Pharmacists enjoy the system because they don't have to staff nights, but they stay in the loop professionally and economically. (As part of the program, each facility much staff an on-call pharmacist.)
  
  
• Administrators report feeling more secure about patient safety in their facilities with telepharmacy in place.
  
  

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