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Medication safety is an integral component of hospice care. Hospices must have organizational policies in place to ensure safe medication prescription, administration, disposal, and documentation. Over the years, numerous issues with regard to medication safety have been brought to light such as errors associated with incorrect dose administration, lack of medication reviews, and inaccurate medication reporting. All of which are results of incomplete and noncompliant medication documentation. Incomplete documentation of patient’s records including medication profiles, can lead to your agency paying legal and settlement fees, having your license suspended or revoked, losing revenue or reimbursements and worse, delivering poor quality care to your patients.
However, most hospices find it challenging to completely document patients’ medication profiles. This is because one patient can have somewhere around 10 prescribed medications, and for hospices with a census of around 20 patients, that means monitoring and documenting at least 200 medications. Data Soft Logic recognized the need for a more convenient way of recording patients’ medications. Thus, we developed three (3) easy functionalities in Hospice Centre’s Medication Profile to help out agencies such as yours achieve more convenient and compliant hospice medication documentation.
Encoding 5–10 medications per comfort kit and having to do the same for numerous more patients, takes a lot of your staff’s workday. To make the process more efficient, Hospice Centre provides readily-available medication templates which you can use as-is or customize according to the drugs’ dose, frequency, etc. This can act as your agency’s formulary for the most common medications you give to your patients. You also do not have to worry about duplicates as the software will prompt you once the same medication is added for a patient. Moreover, you can bundle these medications into comfort kits in just a few clicks and conveniently insert them for other patients who have to take the same set of drugs.
For medications which have a fixed prescription period such as antibiotics, you can now indicate discontinue dates upon time of the order. This way, there is no need for you to manually monitor which ones the patient would have to stop taking after a number of days. Should you need to discontinue a medication later on in the benefit period, you can also easily do so via an update medication order. All added, updated, or discontinued medications would then be reflected in the Medication Profile, for easy reference.
Oftentimes, the creation of infection control reports for prescribed antibiotics of hospice patients is overlooked. This then leads to discrepant findings when the survey period comes. To prevent this from happening, Hospice Centre’s Medication Profile automatically prompts the user for the completion of an infection control report when an antibiotic has been inputted or recorded in the software. With this capability, you can make sure you’re compliant with survey requirements.
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These three functionalities make it easy for hospices like yours to achieve 100% compliant documentation of your patients’ medication profiles, resulting in a less stressful survey or audit season. Get to know Hospice Centre and what more it has to offer you and your agency — schedule a demo with us now.
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