New Group Identifying and Spreading Medication Safety Practices
At atom Alliance, we work to improve medication safety, especially related to high-risk medications like anticoagulants, diabetes agents and opioids in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. Our goals include reducing harm due to these medications and helping people who take these medications stay out of the hospital.
These big goals take all of the stakeholders working together to achieve them. Healthcare providers in all settings are making care safer and establishing best practices every day. But no one has all the answers.
So atom Alliance worked with healthcare providers in each atom Alliance state to form a medication safety advisory board called Team for Innovation in Medication Safety (TIMES). atom Alliance is leveraging providers’ expertise to identify innovative medication safety practices happening in local communities.
The group consists of two or three members from each state. They represent multiple healthcare settings, including home health providers, hospitals, pharmacies and long-term care facilities. All members have a passion for medication safety and a desire to improve patient care.
TIMES has met regularly since March 2016. Their first goals were to pinpoint medication safety best practices and spread them to providers in other atom Alliance states. On each call, group members share their own best practices with the group. TIMES is also a resource for atom Alliance team members.
The “real world” experience of each member helps guide our medication safety work and provides insight into the challenges clinicians face every day – such as simply discharging a patient. For example, a group of Skilled Nursing Facilities developed a program to ensure effective care transition when a patient is discharged home. This included making sure the patient has all of the needed equipment (e.g. walkers, canes, etc.) fitted by a Physical Therapists before discharge, supplying all the medication needed before a patient leaves and scheduling a follow-up phone call. They also staffed a certified diabetes educator and a pharmacist who are available around the clock for questions that patients and/or caregivers may have. These proactive steps have started to show success as reflected in the increase of customer satisfaction when patients go home.
While improving medication safety in our five-state region, and ultimately across the nation, can seem like a daunting task, it is possible when we engage with one another. The TIMES group is one piece of a very large puzzle and a way for us to show how leveraging our collective knowledge makes solving this puzzle possible.
