Case Study: Joseph Brant Hospital

Better medication order processing for better patient care.

About Joseph Brant Hospital

Founded in 1961, Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, Ontario has been providing quality healthcare to their community for over five decades. With a dedicated staff of more than 2,000 physicians, health professionals and volunteers, Joseph Brant is committed to compassionate care and exemplary service.

“Our process is pretty much the same as it was before except it’s electronic. Ricoh matched the technology to our workflow. This has made it extremely easy for everyone to adapt.”
Jane Cheng
Computer Support Pharmacist
Joseph Brant Hospital

Challenge

A significant part of patient care at Joseph Brant is the processing and delivery of medication. In order to facilitate fast and accurate fulfillment, medication orders were sent from the nursing staff to the pharmacy staff via two workflows: a fax-based system for stat orders and a scanning-based system for routine orders.

The inefficiency that this system caused was magnified by the fact that some nursing stations did not have scanning capabilities or had mislabeled buttons. Additionally, the staff had no system in place to see which orders were being processed at any given time.

Using a paper-based system, management also had no means of accessing metrics to assess efficiency, errors, workload and other issues that could help them improve staffing, budgeting and patient care.

Solution

The Ricoh Pharmacy Order Manager Solution was the ideal solution to improve Joseph Brant Hospital’s medication order process.

The solution features powerful DocuScripts software, designed to streamline order placement and fulfillment, and eliminate complications for both pharmacy and nursing staff.
Rather than burden staff with two systems, Ricoh combined the entire medication order process into a single workflow. This triggers the relevant workflow that delivers and displays all orders to the pharmacy and prioritizes stat orders without a single phone call or interruption.
The Ricoh team also provided training material which was used to educate staff on the solution.

Results

Staff and management at Joseph Brant can now trust that medication orders are getting to where they need to go, on time and without errors.

Efficiency has improved across the board. The pharmacy staff can see their entire department’s workload, track who is working on what in real time, and can work from multiple locations within the hospital. Nursing staff can securely view the number of orders their station submitted, which orders are stat, and the current status of any order.

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