Grey Bruce Health Services

Medication order automation project delivers improved pharmacy efficiency and transparency.

About Grey Bruce Health Services

Grey Bruce Health Services operates six hospitals in the Grey Bruce region. With 1,600 staff and nearly 200 physicians across six sites, they offer a full range of primary and ambulatory care services, emergency care, and specialty services including complex surgeries. Embracing the core values of exceptional care and leadership, Grey Bruce Health Services has made it their mission to provide their community with quality health care close to home.

"The Ricoh system certainly met all of our needs, and fit within the workflows we already had in place."
Trent Fookes
Director of Pharmacy
Grey Bruce Health Services

Challenge

The Grey Bruce Health Services pharmacy was struggling to keep up with an increasing workload. Servicing three to twelve hospitals at any given time, staff was overburdened with order entry and managing an overwhelming paper system. The pharmacy was getting to the point where their workload was exceeding their resources. If they didn't make a change, they were going to have to start adding staff or radically changing the roles of individuals.

Not only was the paper system inefficient and time consuming, it required pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to be physically situated next to a printer, severely limiting their mobility and ability to spend time at the point of care. The pharmacists noticed that they were tied to the entry and verification of medication orders in their central pharmacy, when they really wanted to get back up to the clinical areas. This way, they would have more impact at the front end of the system, rather than solving problems that had already occurred.

Solution

Grey Bruce Health Services was impressed with Ricoh's Pharmacy Order Manager Solution featuring DocuScripts software, and went ahead with the implementation.

Ricoh was one of several vendors approached by Grey Bruce Health Services to help them move away from the paper-based medication order management system and toward a more modern, streamlined workflow. We stood out as being able to turn around our requirements very quickly, while at the same time offering them a solution that they actually needed.

Using Ricoh's Pharmacy Order Manager Solution, prescriptions can be scanned at a nursing station or communications sent from the nursing software directly to the on- or off-site pharmacy – no paper prescription required. The pharmacy has access to a dashboard that helps prioritize and track orders as they move through the system, ensuring confidentiality and accuracy while eliminating unnecessary steps involved in a paper-based system.

The Ricoh solution met all of the pharmacy's needs, and fit within the workflows they already had in place. They didn't have to design new workflows around an existing product – it was imported into their existing system, which also allowed them to improve their workflows along the way.

Result

The entire pharmacy back end has improved dramatically.

Now, pharmacy technicians can jump in and out of the order management workflow seamlessly, and pharmacists are no longer tied to a single location to verify medication orders. They can view and verify from any computer anywhere, whether in the pharmacy, at the bedside, or remotely.

By enabling the pharmacy to manage medication orders digitally, patient files and prescription information can be accessed instantly and simultaneously at any workstation. Eliminating physical prescriptions means less paper consumption and waste, as well as a faster and more efficient workflow. The pharmacy estimates they save 30 or 40 seconds per order — on about a thousand orders processed per day — which has a huge impact.

The Ricoh solution also created benefits beyond the staff's expectations, including increased visibility into the pharmacy workflow. The solution has improved communication between nursing, physicians and the pharmacy, and allows for a deeper analysis of current workloads and capacity.

Because the previous system used paper orders and fax transmissions, they had no idea how to analyze the subprocesses between a physician writing an order on the clinic unit to it being sent to the pharmacy, entered, verified and dispensed. The solution now allows them to actually look into these subprocesses, assess orders and process them as well as manage their workforce.

Download PDF