Patient Safety Measures:
Safe Medication Administration
What are we measuring and why?
We measure how far we've come in adopting the technologies to reduce medication errors. There are several parts to the system: barcoding the patients, barcoding the providers, barcoding the drugs themselves, and adopting the software (called electronic medication administration record or EMAR) to link the pieces together.
EMAR lets nurses see a list of all medications ordered for each patient. It also alerts nurses about due or overdue medications. And, it can be used with barcode technology to match the scanned medication and the patient with the doctor’s order, to verify that everything is correct.
How are we doing and how do we compare to best practice?
Partners HealthCare has made the adoption of this technology a system wide priority, and as a result, we have reached optimum levels of performance for our use of barcoding and EMAR.
What are we doing to improve?
Although we have reached optimum performance on this measure, our work is not done. We continue to monitor our progress, share best practices, and evaluate advances in the technology to maintain implementation in all our hospitals.
Chart for Safe Medication Administration
Number of Goals Achieved in Safe Medication Administration
Partners HealthCare Data Period: July – September 2010
Although we have reached optimum performance on this measure, our work is not done. We continue to monitor our progress, share best practices, and evaluate advances in the technology to maintain implementation in all our hospitals.
The plan for safe medication administration at all Partners hospitals includes achievement of four "goals," or necessary components of the system. These components are software for electronic medication administration records (eMAR); and barcoding each of the people or items involved: the wristband of the patient, the caregiver administering the drug, and the drug itself. A hospital gets credit for achieving a goal when at least 75% of beds are covered by that component. The Partners-wide goal for safe medication administration is for each hospital to achieve all four components.
Partners HealthCare Source: Partners HealthCare High Performance Medicine