2024 marks the 10th anniversary of MEDITECH’s partnership with Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. We are thrilled to celebrate this milestone and some of the achievements and innovations we have collaborated on.
Improving the Chemotherapeutic Product Manufacturing Process
Manufacturing chemotherapy products is a precise and critically important part of any oncology centre’s operations, pharmacy, and clinical workflows. Delivering the right chemotherapy medication to the right patient, with the right dose, at the right time is paramount. The manufacturing worksheet and product labels are the critical element, or ‘lynchpin,’ that drives the entire manufacturing process and ensures all chemotherapeutic products are produced to the exact required specifications.
For years, Lifehouse had been following a well-honed process of generating manufacturing worksheets and labels that proved highly accurate and successful. This process, however, was extremely manual and labour-intensive and consumed a significant amount of time and energy on the part of Lifehouse’s pharmacy team.
In late 2022, Lifehouse approached MEDITECH with an idea and proposal to enhance the Expanse solution in ways that would significantly streamline the process of generating manufacturing worksheets and, in so doing, give valuable time back to the pharmacy team.
Lifehouse and MEDITECH worked closely together through a collaborative and exhaustive design process to ensure they reviewed and accounted for every detail and use case — right through to the testing to ensure that every little wrinkle and hiccup was found and resolved before deployment of the feature in the live production environment.
The outcome is fully automating the completion of the manufacturing worksheets and creating a new batch printing routine that is significantly more efficient than the previous workflow process. This automation resulted in significant time savings for the Lifehouse pharmacy team and allowed them to focus on more essential duties. One member of the Lifehouse team went so far as to call it “a game changer” concerning gains in efficiency it has helped Lifehouse achieve.
Developments for Palliative Care
In line with the New South Wales Health Guidelines, when a patient becomes a Palliative Care Patient after an Acute Stay, the Palliative Care stay requires a new admission with separate reporting and coding. To accommodate this requirement, an additional admission was needed for the palliative care stay. This process increased workload because data had to be re-captured and backdated, with no contingency existing between the acute setting and sub-acute setting visit.
The Palliative Care development allowed for an automated and seamless transition of the acute stay into the palliative stay, thus reducing the workload and effort required to create separate accounts and data duplication. In addition, it also enhanced the quality of coding, billing, and reporting.
Lifehouse observed a significant reduction in errors with the automation by invoking a routine that:
- On discharge of the acute visit, auto creates a new palliative sub-acute account as a copy of the acute account.
- Uses the acute account’s discharge date and time as the sub-acute account’s admission date and time + 1 minute.
- Allows users to edit the copied provider, insurance, and other information.
- Automatically undoes the events on the acute account after discharge and copies those events onto the sub-acute (palliative) account.
In addition, the Restorable Orders can be transferred from the acute account to the sub-acute account using the standard MEDITECH functionality if required; otherwise, they will continue on the acute admission until discharge. Clinical data can also be documented on the sub-acute episode, evidenced by the care type.
These are just two examples of how automated workflows can help improve clinical efficiency, patient safety, and operational performance.
