As Hospitals Work to Solve Drug Diversion Problem, LogicStream Health Expands Pharmacy Software Suite by Introducing The Drug Diversion App
MINNEAPOLIS – December 9, 2019 – LogicStream Health, a leading clinical process improvement and control software provider supporting hundreds of hospitals nationwide, introduced new software that helps hospital pharmacy teams proactively manage and better control drug diversion activity.
The Drug Diversion App from LogicStream Health™ gives hospitals early warning signals about potential instances of drug diversion and clinicians who may be diverting medications. According to Patrick Yoder, PharmD, CEO and co-founder of LogicStream Health, “The Drug Diversion App is truly unique because it aggregates electronic health record (EHR), automated dispensing cabinet (ADC) and carousel data, as well as other data sources to produce an ongoing stream of information and notification of potential diversion activity.”
Dr. Yoder said The Drug Diversion App “provides active surveillance of drug ordering, administration and all dispensation activities, signaling to administrators and clinical leaders which clinicians are potentially diverting drugs.” The App combines multiple data sources to detect warning signs attributable to an individual, rather than comparing data medication by medication. “This approach allows for a deeper investigation leading to a decision to intervene or to dismiss warning signals, all from within The App.”
The Drug Diversion App is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2020, with several innovation partners beginning trial use in January. The Drug Diversion App is part of an expanding suite of pharmacy software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps running on the LogicStream Health Clinical Process Improvement and Control Platform that provides insights to better manage problems like drug diversion and drug shortages. The company introduced The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ in December 2018. Since its introduction, The Drug Shortage App has been selected for use by nearly 100 hospitals.
Demonstrations of The Drug Diversion App and The Drug Shortage App were held at the ASHP Midyear 2019 Clinical Meeting & Exhibition and are available now for you to see!
About LogicStream Health LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement SaaS platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams. LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.
The following is a guest article on clinical documentation by Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health and Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive at Elsevier.
Clinical documentation is widely known to be a time-consuming task. Much of that documenting rests on the shoulders of nurses, who use health information technology to help juggle their many roles: caring for patients, helping to maximize performance in the midst of changing reimbursement models, achieving regulatory compliance, promoting better outcomes and increasing patient satisfaction.
Unfortunately, nurses often feel as though the tools designed to help capture and share information are part of the problem. A major issue is lack of standardization. Some healthcare organizations attempt to meet everyone’s needs by creating specific resources to accommodate individual clinicians or departments. That lack of consistency paired with excess requirements leads to variability in care. While everyone agrees that capturing, documenting and disseminating clinical data is essential, it’s also clear that there’s a need to improve how it’s done, including the processes and tools involved.
“Nursing documentation as a whole is frequently enhanced and expanded upon, and flowsheet-related content is no exception,” explains Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health. “Often, flowsheet rows are customized, causing unnecessary variation and duplication. As a result, multiple versions of a single flowsheet row can send users down different pathways. Unfortunately, these duplications persist within the EHR where they go on to deliver outdated and often competing guidance long after evidence-based best practices have been revised.”
Driving fragmented care
“Traditional workflows used by nurses and then the rest of the care team often contribute to fragmented care,” says Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier. “This can happen due to the siloed-nature of healthcare settings, such as differences between the ambulatory and acute care settings, or varying approaches used by various specialties, but we also see fragmented care within a single department. The reason is that each discipline, or interprofessional teammate, has their own set of tools they use, which live in the EHR but never get merged together.”
For example, if a physical therapist (PT) has just been at the bedside visiting a patient, how does the nurse tap into the information coming out of that visit? Can the nurse easily find out what the PT thinks about how the patient is doing and the care plan they have put in place? Are those insights, which are essential to ensure patient safety, brought to life within the nursing workflow? Or does the nurse have to search the EHR to find it? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. If the nurse isn’t aware that the PT goal for the patient is walking 50 feet that day with a standby assist, the nurse might have the patient walk more – or less – and do so unassisted.
Consider how discrepancies like the PT example are multiplied throughout the day for every patient, because insights from each member of the care team all exist in different parts of the EHR. They’re all guided by different workflows, some of which may be driven by outdated evidence. It paints a compelling case of the urgent need for optimization.
“Care fragmentation increases patient healthcare costs while diminishing the quality of care,” says McCauley. “In this environment, important health issues are not properly addressed, patient health outcomes are at risk, and there is an increased likelihood of unnecessary or potentially harmful health services.”
Documentation optimization is even more critical when caring for patients who endure one or more chronic conditions and are particularly at risk of fragmented care. That’s because caring for these patients typically involves multiple participants who each provide specialized knowledge, skills and services. What needs to be done to fix this problem and provide coordinated care? One answer is to optimize processes and systems to reduce variation and ensure clinicians are using up-to-date, evidence-based guidance.
Building in evidence-based guidance
“The volume of available medical knowledge is doubling every few months as new guidelines are released and standards are updated,” says McCauley. “It’s unrealistic for any care team to keep up with all the relevant, evidence-based information that impacts patient care. That’s why the integration of evidence-based medicine into clinical workflows is essential. Its application at the bedside drives ongoing improvements in clinical decision-making and, ultimately, overall patient outcomes.”
So how do hospitals streamline their systems to remove variation and consistently deliver current, evidence-based guidance? First, it helps to understand how the content inside the EHR tends to evolve, and why.
“Hospital systems make multiple changes in their EHRs every day,” says Campbell. “Sometimes those modifications are based on the unique needs of a specialty area, but other requests for changes may be rooted in how a team in a particular nursing department prefers to interact with the system. These changes are made with the intent of increasing efficiency, but the overall impact often is just the opposite.”
Using data-driven insights
To optimize nursing documentation, health systems are using clinical process improvement solutions that provide data-driven insights into the extent of duplication, frequency of changes and comparison with best practices to determine which guidance has the most clinical value. Armed with that information, hospitals can make necessary adjustments to their EHR.
In addition to speeding up the documentation process, the removal of unnecessary flowsheet duplication helps the entire clinical team ensure continuity of care when the patient is transitioned to another part of the health system. This is especially important when caring for patients with complex health needs.
“Technology solutions are now available to assess the clinician workflows and understand how care is being provided. By evaluating workflows alongside outcomes, health systems can understand where the evidence-based best practices are being followed and where they can be implemented,” said Campbell. “More importantly, once those workflows are implemented, measuring and managing those workflows as the evidence changes are ways we can have a significant positive impact on patient outcomes.”
Increasing satisfaction
Clinicians are hungry for change. Reducing the documentation burden on nurses lets them focus on the more rewarding aspects of their job. A recent study revealed that 85 percent of clinicians agree that coordinated, collaborative, interprofessional practice increases their job satisfaction.
“If people don’t understand how to use the evidence-based content and apply it to their day-to-day work, then it’s not solving the issue of fragmented systems,” explains McCauley. “It’s important to achieve a balance by implementing the right content and technology while focusing on the clinical team’s perspective and working from there to achieve the interprofessional collaboration required under emerging quality-based care models.”
About Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN
Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, is a Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health. Campbell is an informaticist and registered nurse focused on quality of care, improving documentation standards and clinical process improvement. As a registered nurse she provides care in the perioperative and critical care specialties. Campbell earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her Doctor of Nursing Practice in Nursing Informatics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
About Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN
Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN serves as a Nursing Executive with Elsevier Clinical Solutions. In this role she collaborates with health care systems, academic centers and physician practices to reduce variation in care, standardizing practice and improving patient outcomes through the application of evidence-based decisions at the point of care. Prior to joining Elsevier McCauley lead the development of nursing and patient education programs at a number of leading community-based health care organizations. Her focus has been on improving staff engagement and the patient experience by leading change initiatives related to standardizing clinical knowledge and practice while effectively engaging patients in their care across care settings. McCauley believes this is a key component in improving the healthcare experience for patients.
By Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health & Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier
How process, evidence and technology come together to improve coordination of patient care, increase efficiency and boost clinician satisfaction
Hospital systems rely on nurses to do more than ever before. Beyond caring for patients, nurses are tasked with helping to maximize performance in the midst of changing reimbursement models, achieve regulatory compliance, promote better outcomes and increase patient satisfaction. Nurses are under an immense amount of pressure to provide coordinated patient care. Sometimes, the biggest challenge is feeling as though the tools designed to help capture and share information are part of the problem.
A major problem is lack of standardization. Organizations attempt to meet everyone’s needs by creating specific resources to accommodate individual clinicians or departments. The lack of consistency paired with excess requirements leads to variability in care.
The good news is that optimizing clinical documentation can yield significant benefits, including improvements in patient care and safety, clinician satisfaction and efficiency, as well as a reduction in errors and unnecessary procedures.
19 to 35 percent of nursing practice time is spent documenting care
Nurses document an average of one data point every minute
There are more than 600 manual flowsheet data entries into electronic health records (EHRs) during a 12-hour shift
The study examined the number and frequency of data points entered into an EHR by bedside nurses working in acute care general medicine units and intensive care units (ICUs) for 12 months. The researchers discovered that on average during a 12-hour shift, nurses perform 787 to 852 flowsheet data entries in an ICU and 667 to 930 flowsheet data entries on an acute care floor. That’s a lot of data.
In addition to items measured in the study, other documentation requirements consume additional time, such as medication administration, plan of care, patient education and narrative notes. For example, other research findings cited in the study showed that nurses spend approximately 21 to 38 minutes writing narrative notes every day.
Fueling the documentation burden
Everyone agrees that capturing, documenting and disseminating clinical data is essential. It’s also clear that there’s a need to improve how it’s done, including the processes and tools involved, since a major contributor to the nursing documentation burden is unnecessary variation.
“Nursing documentation as a whole is frequently enhanced and expanded upon, flowsheet related content is no exception,” explains Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, Clinical Informaticist, LogicStream Health. “Often, flowsheet rows are customized, causing unnecessary variation and duplication. As a result, multiple versions of a single flowsheet row can send users down different pathways. Unfortunately, these duplications persist within the EHR where they go on to deliver outdated and often competing guidance long after evidence-based best practices have been revised.”
Contributing to fragmented care
“Traditional workflows used by nurses and then the rest of the care team often contribute to fragmented care,” says Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier. “This can happen due to the siloed-nature of healthcare settings, such as differences between the ambulatory and acute care settings, or varying approaches used by various specialties, but we also see fragmented care with a single department. The reason is that each discipline, or interprofessional teammate, has their own set of tools they use, which live in the EHR but never get merged together.”
For example, if a physical therapist (PT) has just been at the bedside visiting a patient, how does the nurse tap into the information coming out of that visit? Can the nurse easily find out what the PT thinks about how the patient is doing and the care plan they have put in place? Are those insights, which are essential to ensure patient safety, brought to life within the nursing workflow? Or does the nurse have to search the EHR to find it? Unfortunately, it’s often the latter. That inefficiency is a significant burden given how busy care teams are. If the nurse isn’t aware that the PT goal for the patient is walking 50 feet that day with a standby assist, the nurse might have the patient walk more – or less – and do so unassisted.
Consider how discrepancies like the PT example are multiplied throughout the day for every patient because insights from each member of the care team all exist in different parts of the EHR. They’re all guided by different workflows, some of which may be driven by outdated evidence. It paints a compelling case of the urgent need for optimization.
“Care fragmentation increases patient healthcare costs while diminishing the quality of care,” says McCauley. “In this environment, important health issues are not properly addressed, patient health outcomes are at risk, and there is an increased likelihood of unnecessary or potentially harmful health services.”
Data shows that the time lag between when clinical measurements or observations are made and when they get reported in flowsheets varies. These delays can have a negative impact on patient care. Getting accurate and timely information into the hands of the care providers is essential for patient safety.
Source: LogicStream Health
Complex patients
Documentation optimization is even more critical when caring for patients who endure one or more chronic conditions and are particularly at risk of fragmented care. That’s because caring for these patients typically involves multiple participants who each provide specialized knowledge, skills, and services.
When fragmented care is provided to patients with complex conditions, they encounter higher rates of emergency department visits, more hospital admissions and greater healthcare costs. A 2018 study by The Commonwealth Fund, Whether Fragmented Care is Hazardous Depends on How Many Chronic Conditions a Patient Has, found that patients with one or two chronic conditions and highly fragmented care were 13 percent more likely to visit the emergency department than those who had the least fragmented care. A 2015 study in the American Journal of Managed Care, Care Fragmentation, Quality, and Costs Among Chronically Ill Patients, found that patients with highly fragmented care had an average total cost of $10,396 over a 35-month period, compared to an average cost of just $5,854 among those who received the least fragmented care during the same period of time.
So, what needs to be done to fix this problem and provide coordinated care? One answer is to optimize processes and systems to reduce variation and ensure clinicians are using up-to-date, evidence-based guidance.
Evidence-based workflows
“The volume of available medical knowledge is doubling every few months as new guidelines are released and standards are updated,” says McCauley. “It’s unrealistic for any care team to keep up with all the relevant, evidence-based information that impacts patient care. That’s why the integration of evidence-based medicine into clinical workflows is essential. Its application at the bedside drives ongoing improvements in clinical decision-making and, ultimately, overall patient outcomes.”
Evidence-informed care has many benefits. It reduces unwanted variability across the continuum, drives the plan of care in a meaningful manner and helps achieve regulatory compliance. Using tools such as a combined evidence-based comorbidities template, for example, can help reduce documentation fatigue for clinicians and improve continuity of care regardless of the healthcare setting.
Technology solutions
So how do hospitals streamline their systems to remove variation and consistently deliver up-to-date, evidence-based guidance? First, it helps to understand how the content inside the EHR tends to evolve, and why.
“Hospital systems make multiple changes in their EHRs every day,” says Campbell. “Sometimes those modifications are based on the unique needs of a specialty area, but other requests for changes may be rooted in how a team in a particular nursing department prefers to interact with the system. These changes are made with the intent of increasing efficiency, but the overall impact often is just the opposite.”
Campbell shared a few examples of the unintended consequences of workflow modifications:
Combining too much information in a single row. That sounds like efficiency, but instead is overwhelming and impacts a nurse’s cognitive workload. When multiple options for assessments and interventions are combined in a single row, nurses are less certain about what they’re expected to document.
Renaming flowsheet rows. In some cases, a flowsheet row, such as for catheter intervention, gets duplicated under a different name but has the same answers as the original row, so nurses end up using both options. This lack of consistency causes loss of standardization and creates a deviation from the desired clinical process. It also makes it much harder to aggregate data and decreases the visibility of documentation across care units and from nurse to nurse. This is often caused by personal favorites or requests from individual clinicians or departments that deviate from the hospital-approved standard.
Persistence of outdated guidance. Customized flowsheet rows often include guidelines that are no longer relevant or appropriate, but the health system doesn’t realize those rows still exist. Because guidelines are constantly changing, it’s essential to ensure that old information is removed when new evidence is added.
To optimize nursing documentation, health systems are using clinical process improvement solutions that provide data-driven insights into the extent of duplication, frequency of changes and comparison with best practices to determine which guidance has the most clinical value. Armed with that information, hospitals can make necessary adjustments to their EHR. In addition to speeding up the documentation process, the removal of unnecessary flowsheet duplication helps the entire clinical team ensure continuity of care when the patient is transitioned to another part of the health system.
Impact of coordinated care
Optimizing and standardizing the process of collecting and disseminating information to help drive coordinated care is essential. Why? Consider the following evidence of the impact of fragmented versus coordinated care.
Uncoordinated care leads to communication failure, higher drug costs, duplicate testing, a lack of patient engagement and higher readmission rates. According to the American Nurses Association, patients with uncoordinated care experience 75 percent higher costs than patients with coordinated care. The American Journal of Managed Care reported that fragmented care leads to twice as many primary care visits and six times as many specialist visits.
Patients experiencing highly fragmented care have twice as many primary care visits, and 6 times as many specialist visits.
Source: The American Journal of Managed Care, May 2015.
In contrast, patient-centered care coordination can have a compelling impact on patient outcomes and healthcare costs. Interprofessional collaboration and continuity of care are associated with better preventive care, fewer emergency department visits and hospital admissions, and better patient experience.
The power of interprofessional collaboration:
Source: Journal of Interprofessional Education & Practice. ScienceDirect. Jun 2017.
Clinician satisfaction and culture
Clinicians are hungry for a change. Reducing the documentation burden on nurses lets them focus on the more rewarding aspects of their job. A recent study revealed that 85 percent of clinicians agree that coordinated, collaborative, inter-disciplinary practice increases their job satisfaction.
As with any change, culture is a key component of successful system optimization. Technology tools alone aren’t going to drive evidence-based, interprofessional practice. From leadership to members of the clinical team, everyone must embrace the philosophy behind the tools to optimize and sustain an enhanced professional practice.
“If people don’t understand how to use the evidence-based content and apply it to their day-to-day work, then it’s not solving the issue of fragmented systems,” explains McCauley. “It’s important to achieve a balance by implementing the right content and technology while focusing on the clinical team’s perspective and working from there to achieve the multi-disciplinary collaboration required under emerging quality-based care models.”
“Technology solutions are now available to assess the clinician workflows and understand how care is being provided. By evaluating workflows alongside outcomes, health systems are able to understand what the evidence-based best practices are and how they can be implemented,” said Campbell. “More importantly, once those workflows are implemented, measuring and management of those workflows as the evidence changes are ways we can have a significant positive impact on patient outcomes.”
About the Authors
Jessica Campbell, DNP, RN, is a Clinical Informaticist at LogicStream Health. Campbell is an informaticist and registered nurse focused on quality of care, improving documentation standards and clinical process improvement. As a registered nurse she provides care in the perioperative and critical care specialties. Campbell earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and her Doctor of Nursing Practice in Nursing Informatics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN, Clinical Executive, Elsevier Tiffany McCauley, MSN, RN serves as a Nursing Executive with Elsevier Clinical Solutions. In this role she collaborates with health care systems, academic centers and physician practices to reduce variation in care, standardizing practice and improving patient outcomes through the application of evidence-based decisions at the point of care. Prior to joining Elsevier McCauley lead the development of nursing and patient education programs at a number of leading community-based health care organizations. Her focus has been on improving staff engagement and the patient experience by leading change initiatives related to standardizing clinical knowledge and practice while effectively engaging patients in their care across care settings. McCauley believes this is a key component in improving the healthcare experience for patients.
Solution reduces documentation burden, with one large health system reducing documentation time by more than six minutes per nurse per shift.
Minneapolis, MN – August 8, 2019 – Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, and LogicStream Health, a leading provider of clinical process improvement and control software, will collaborate to meet health systems’ needs for optimizing their nursing practice and documentation.
Nurses are burdened with heavy documentation responsibilities, particularly into electronic health records (EHRs). A recent studyi found that nurses on average document one data point every minute and spend 19 to 35 percent of practice time documenting care. Capturing and making sense of that content, and alleviating some of that burden through smarter documentation, will save time and effort for nurses and improve patient care.
Elsevier and LogicStream Health are tackling the problem of nurse documentation burden together by closely aligning their products: LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement and Control Software Solutions and Elsevier’s Care Planning.
LogicStream Health’s Clinical Process Improvement and Control Software Solutions offers hospital and clinic staff an efficient and effective way to manage their nursing flowsheets and measure their effectiveness for the clinical care being delivered.
A Shared Vision
“Elsevier and LogicStream Health have a shared vision about the need to fix big, costly problems in healthcare associated with clinical variation,” said Patrick Yoder, PharmD, Chief Executive Officer, LogicStream Health. “Lack of standardization in nursing flowsheets causes an enormous burden in terms of cost and time that nurses spend on documentation and can be an impediment to delivering effective patient care. Customers using our platform and nursing documentation optimization solutions have saved millions of dollars in nursing overtime expense and related labor efficiencies in their clinical process improvement efforts. One large health system in the Midwest was able to eliminate more than six minutes of flowsheet documentation time per nurse per shift. For a health system with 1,000 nurses that translates to 120,000 hours of nursing time per year and could save more than $8M in overtime. We are very excited about bringing this solution to market with Elsevier, the world’s leader in healthcare analytics solutions.”
Elsevier’s Care Planning, the Category Leader for Clinical Decision Support: Care Plans and Order Sets in the Best in KLAS®: Software & Services Report* for three straight years, is the industry’s only EHR-based care planning solution that combines the patient story, more than 600 evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and standardized assessments into one patient-centered plan of care across all care settings and disciplines.
“Effective longitudinal care coordination combined with practice transformation and optimized documentation workflows can help healthcare organizations improve care delivery,” said Hajo Oltmanns, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Clinical Solutions, Elsevier. “Elsevier is pleased to add LogicStream Health’s nurse documentation solution into our Care Planning suite. Together, we will help health systems reduce care variability and improve outcomes.”
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes. Healthcare customers are generating millions of dollars in ROI from the LogicStream Health platform, for example, by reducing high-cost medications; achieving significant reductions in CAUTI; and, reaching nearly 100% compliance with VTE protocols. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform complements modern EHR systems and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts, and executive teams striving to better control and manage clinical processes in near-real-time. LogicStream Health, developed by clinicians for clinicians, today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize process and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, visit our home page. Our mission is clear – Helping clinicians improve and better control the care they deliver to every patient, every day.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a global information analytics business that helps scientists and clinicians to find new answers, reshape human knowledge, and tackle the most urgent human crises. For 140 years, we have partnered with the research world to curate and verify scientific knowledge. Today, we’re committed to bringing that rigor to a new generation of platforms. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and professional education; including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, 39,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray’s Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. www.elsevier.com.
Annual ‘Breakthrough Awards Program’ Recognizes Outstanding Technological Innovations in the Health and Medical Industries
Minneapolis, MN – June 6, 2019
LogicStream Health today announced that The Drug Shortage App From LogicStream HealthTM won the “Clinical Efficiency Innovation Award” by MedTech Breakthrough, an independent organization that recognizes technological innovation in the health and medical industries. This award comes from MedTech Breakthrough’s annual awards program, which garnered more than 3,500 nominations from across the globe.
The Drug Shortage App addresses the growing concern of the drug shortage crisis in the U.S. healthcare system, and its many negative repercussions. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the number and duration of prescription drug shortages is growing; these shortages lead to: rising drug costs; a negative impact on pharmacist productivity levels; compromised or delayed medical procedures and drug therapy efforts; and healthcare professionals forced to turn to other medications, which can lead to increased risks to patient safety.
The Drug Shortage App, however, works to provide healthcare
professionals and hospital pharmacists necessary early-warning information to
manage both supply and demand for specific medications during a shortage. The
app allows professionals to see which clinicians frequently prescribe and
dispense certain medications, to manage inventory levels, and evaluate when the
shortage is over.
Patrick Yoder, PharmD, Co-Founder and CEO, LogicStream Health, said,
“Our groundbreaking drug shortage app has tremendous momentum this year with
several new major U.S. health systems signing up and a healthy ongoing demand
and pipeline. We are thrilled to accept this honor from MedTech Breakthrough
and will continue to strive for innovation and excellence in all we do in our
mission to combat the nationwide drug shortage crisis.”
“The annual awards program celebrates the world’s most outstanding
Digital Health and Medical Technology products, services and companies, and
LogicStream Health’s Drug Shortage App is certainly one to celebrate,” said James
Johnson, managing director, MedTech Breakthrough. “This organization and
product is actively working to address a real concern within the healthcare
industry, and they continue to use innovation and creativity to do so. We are
proud to recognize LogicStream Health as a marquee innovator in our 2019
MedTech Breakthrough Awards program.”
This annual MedTech Breakthrough awards program recognizes many
innovative companies and products from across the globe. Along with the
Clinical Efficiency Innovation Award, MedTech Breakthrough also names winners
in the following categories: Best Computerized Decision Support (CDS) Solution,
Patient Engagement Innovation Award, Best Overall Healthcare Cybersecurity
Company, Best Health Network Technology Implementation, and dozens more.
About LogicStream Health:
LogicStream Health is
trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the
United States. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform as well as The
Drug Shortage App stand alone in their ability to help customers gain instant
insights to improve vital clinical processes and better control patient care.
As a result, hospitals and health systems reduce cost and improve outcomes.
Healthcare customers are saving millions of dollars on the LogicStream Health
platform. For more information about The Drug Shortage App, visit www.thedrugshortageapp.com.
About MedTech Breakthrough:
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the MedTech Breakthrough Awards program is an independent program devoted to honoring excellence in medical and health related technology companies, products, services and people. The MedTech Breakthrough Awards provide a platform for public recognition around the achievements of breakthrough health and medical companies and products in categories that include Patient Engagement, mHealth, Health & Fitness, Clinical Administration, Healthcare IoT, Medical Data, Healthcare Cybersecurity and more. For more information, visit MedTechBreakthrough.com.
On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist (YFP) podcast, Tim Ulbrich, YFP co-founder, interviews Dr. Patrick Yoder, co-founder and CEO of LogicStream Health.
Together, they discuss Patrick’s journey as a pharmacy entrepreneur, getting his PharmD from the University of Iowa, starting as a clinical pharmacist at Lake Regional Health System, serving as the Director and then VP of Clinical Development and Informatics at Wolters Kluwer to being the Co-Founder and CEO of LogicStream Health since 2013.
Summary
When Patrick graduated from pharmacy school, there was a shortage of pharmacists. He chose to become a clinical pharmacist, leading him into taking on more business roles in companies.
These roles motivated Patrick to use technology to change the way pharmacists work with electronic health records. He took risks to co-found LogicStream Health and continued his business-oriented journey. He currently serves as the company’s CEO. In 2018, The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ had its debut.
Patrick shares advice on starting an app, why serving in the community is important and also what should be done to expose more pharmacists to an entrepreneurial path in pharmacy school in this episode.
About Patrick Yoder
Patrick developed a passion for innovation by reengineering bicycles to better suit the needs of childhood. He started his career in medical research, then as a clinical pharmacist and an informaticist. He developed experience leading innovative teams at Wolters Kluwer. There, he spearheaded the creation of a solution that established the company as the recognized leader in the market within four years. He also led the informatics team at Hennepin County Medical Center before co-founding LogicStream Health. Patrick enjoys scuba diving, running and cycling in his time away from LogicStream Health.
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
Also available is The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™. It reduces risk to patients, controls medication spend and increases staff productivity as a result of the ongoing drug shortage epidemic. The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time. It’s also designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams.
LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare. For more information, please visit www.LogicStreamHealth.com.
Jan. 3, 2019 – To kick off the new year, our LogicStream Health team made its way to New Hope, MN to volunteer with The Food Group.
We prepared food boxes to go to areas in need and packaged popcorn snack bags. We also got to learn about the various ways that The Food Group makes a positive difference in their community.
How We Served
While we were at The Food Group, we rotated between two shifts and teams working on different food activities.
One team worked together to sort food. Food is constantly being donated to The Food Group – enough to fill a warehouse! Before it can get sent to partner locations and distributed throughout the community, it needs to get sorted. We created boxes of food that were smaller and easier to carry. They also contained a better variety of canned goods and other healthy non-perishables.
The second team worked on packaging popcorn. Healthy meal options aren’t the only thing provided by The Food Group. They also acquire large bags of popcorn that they use to create smaller, snack-sized bags for families! The popcorn also goes to partner locations to deliver to areas in need.
The Impact
During our time at The Food Group, we were able to sort four pallets of food boxes and create 850 bags of popcorn. The food boxes weighed 4,400 pounds total. With 22 volunteers present, this equaled 208 meals and almost 39 bags of popcorn per volunteer!
For more than 40 years, The Food Group has worked to provide good foods to those who need it most in their community. They focus on local food access, equity, and nutrition issues related to food and hunger. They serve more than 32 counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The Food Group works on both ends of the food system from production to distribution. To build a better local food system for all, they focus on breaking down barriers to growing good food locally and getting good food to those who need it most. There are also multiple programs available. They include food banking, cultural equity, nutritional outreach, direct services, sustainable agriculture and more.
About LogicStream Health
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company also has a clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. This stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology. It enables clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time. It is also designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by all end-users.
LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare.
December 18, 2018 – Jeremy Olson from the Star Tribune recently wrote an article about The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™. The Drug Shortage App is the first of its kind and able to help hospitals and health systems tackle drug shortages.
Article Summary
LogicStream Health, a health care technology company based in Minnesota, is tackling the costly problem of drug shortages. Inpatient drug spending can inflate by 1 to 5 percent due to shortages. This can ultimately create millions of dollars in waste.
The Drug Shortage App utilizes a combination of sources across the nation to allow hospitals to be proactive about drug shortages. Using a Predictive Impact Score and usage information, The Drug Shortage App tailors potential shortages on a location-by-location basis.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) maintains a list of drugs in short supply, but The Drug Shortage App provides faster, earlier and clearer guidance.
The Predictive Impact Score can also be used to differentiate between shortages that might affect a hospital. This helps to eliminate buying in panic and wasting excess spend and inventory.
If not managed properly, drug shortages can increase costs or cause pharmacy staff to spend excess time identifying shortages and hunting for remaining supplies of drugs on the market. The biggest risk is the nightmare scenario when a pharmacist can’t find a drug that a patient needs.
These reasons are few of many that create the rising urgency for hospitals and health systems to determine an effective way to mange drug shortages.
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company also has a clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. This stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology. It enables clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time. It is also designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by all end-users.
LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare.
December 2-6, 2018 – LogicStream Health was in Anaheim, California for the 2018 ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting. While we were there, While we were there, we had the pleasure of speaking with many attendees in the pharmacy community and share The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™.
Recap
The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ made its debut at The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists 2018 ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition on December 2-6 in Anaheim, California.
At our booth, members of the LogicStream Health leadership team spoke with over one hundred attendees about trending pharmacy topics. They also gave live demonstrations of the Drug Shortage App to those who wanted to see it during the three day conference. Want to see The Drug Shortage App for yourself? Schedule a demo here!
While attendees weren’t checking out what vendors had to offer at ASHP Midyear they were able to network, attend interactive educational opportunities and more. They could also listen to any of the 500 leading experts speaking on issues relevant to contemporary pharmacy practice.
The Drug Shortage App from LogicStream Health™ quickly and proactively identifies the impact of the accelerating crisis of new medication shortages for hospitals and helps protect the safety of their patients.
Using a proprietary algorithm, The Drug Shortage App provides comprehensive insights into the utilization of drugs in short supply. This empowers pharmacy leaders with the ability to proactively identify the impact of drug shortages, assess possible risks and create action plans to mitigate any adverse effects.
Ultimately, it improves upon the current drug shortage management processes in place at hospitals and health systems to save lives, save time, and save money.
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams.
LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare.
November 28, 2018 – Lee Schafer from the Star Tribune recently wrote an article about the electronic medical record software niche that includes health care providers, their electronic medical records and LogicStream Health’s software solutions.
Summary
“LogicStream Health … [is] a good example of a firm in a technology niche with lots of opportunity that seems to be a great fit with the health care know-how that our region has in abundance” states Schafer. LogicStream Health sells software to big health care providers to help make their electronic medical record (EMR) systems a lot more useful in improving patient care and taking out costs.
Patrick Yoder, LogicStream Health co-founder and CEO, said electronic medical record companies such as Epic and its competitors consider themselves software companies with health care customers. It’s then up to the doctors, nurses and pharmacists to figure out how to best use their EMR systems.
LogicStream Health started with a system that allowed organizations like Fairview Health to better manage all of the content in their electronic medical records. Then, the direction moved to also helping health care providers manage the content of the EMR systems by helping them implement and monitor what they decide is the best or current standard of medical care.
Using a tool like LogicStream Health’s helps design a workflow for a variety of simple to complex cases, ranging from alerts of a patient being due for a colon cancer screening to a full surgery. Additionally, it can help better present preferred protocol recommendations in the EMR to avoid physicians or other across a health care organization bypassing them.
Customers of LogicStream Health primarily focus on what happens once a patient has been admitted to the hospital. When that happens, care has the potential to dramatically jump in cost and lead to lots of opportunity to both waste money and depart from best care practices.
One example comes from a customer who saved some money by dropping a form of blood test that had been routinely ordered when clinicians suspected a heart attack. A newer and better test has been largely adopted, but unless someone changed the electronic medical record, an emergency-room physician could order both tests.
“If health systems are trying to do this work, they can and do utilize their internal reporting teams” without using technology like LogicStream Health’s, said Dr. Brita Hansen, the company’s Chief Medical Officer. “The problem is that they don’t have enough resources to pull reports on all this stuff, and it’s very much not self-service.”
Another EMR problem that this company addresses is looming drug shortages, a surprisingly painful problem for health care providers. By aggregating data from its customer base, LogicStream Health might be able to spot a potential shortage before it develops and suggest some workarounds. Learn more about LogicStream Health’s Drug Shortage App here.
Big opportunities exist in the health information technology industry because of the amount of time clinicians spend maintaining EMR data. Half of a typical physician’s day is spent entering data and doing other clerical work in an EMR, which is one of the top factors leading to physician stress and burnout. That’s where LogicStream Health is available to help.
To read the full Star Tribune article, click the button below.
About LogicStream Health
LogicStream Health is trusted by a community of high-performing healthcare providers across the United States. The company’s clinical process control and improvement software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform stands alone in its ability to help customers gain instant insights to improve vital clinical processes and patient care. As a result, customers reduce cost and improve outcomes.
The LogicStream Health SaaS platform is ‘must-have’ technology enabling clinical teams to quickly improve clinical processes in near-real-time and is designed for rapid implementation and easy adoption by end-user clinicians, informaticists, data analysts and executive teams.
LogicStream Health software today is supporting hundreds of hospitals on a scalable and sustainable technology platform to standardize processes and deliver highly reliable healthcare.
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