First Line Software is a premier provider of software engineering, software enablement, and digital transformation services. Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the global staff of 450 technical experts serve clients across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
It is estimated that every year preventable inpatient medication errors result in over 4 million patient readmissions, 7,000 deaths, and carry a staggering cost of $21 billion.
To mitigate this problem, one of the largest Healthcare institutions in the USA implemented an Electronic Medications Administration Record (EMAR) System and deployed it in its primary hospitals.
The EMAR facilitates a ‘closed-loop’ system: end-to-end electronic medication management with a seamless flow of information throughout the process – from the creation of a medication order, to Rx processing and distribution, to delivery to the right patient.
Over a period of eight years, our team worked with clinicians, hospital administration, and the IT team on the design, implementation, and subsequent maintenance of the EMAR system. This large-scale project required extensive changes to existing processes and workflows, and technological enhancements to the existing technologies.
It is estimated that the deployment of the EMAR system has reduced the cost of medication errors by $25,000 per day – in just one hospital.
The Challenge
The EMAR brought together and communicated with just about every other major inpatient system in the hospital ecosystem including Order Entry, Pharmacy, Discharge, Common Data Repository, and others. It transformed existing workflows and introduced new processes for nurses, pharmacists, physicians, and hospital administrative staff. The project required the deployment of new technology infrastructure that included portable nursing stations and barcode scanners as well as barcode labeling and repackaging of drugs in the inpatient pharmacy.
Our technical team was involved in the design and development of the entire system as well as its major components from early on in the process to its production deployment and support. We’ve worked on several iterations of the system on different software and hardware platforms and facilitated its integration with other tools.
The transition from a single-hospital system to Enterprise EMAR created its own set of challenges. As part of the joined team from several institutions and corporate IS we had to develop a data model and create unified processes that supported the needs of the Enterprise without disrupting an already working deployment of the EMAR system in the first hospital.
The Outcome
The EMAR system has gone through a sequence of successive production rollouts over a period of 8 years. Our client believes that the Electronic Medication Administration Record system in combination with bar code technology completely transformed how nurses administer medications. The EMAR system has vastly improved the management and tracking of patient information, and it ensured that nurses deliver the right medication at the right dosage to the right patient at the right time.
The EMAR system has also proven to be highly effective in reducing administration errors. The management of the hospital has estimated that the new system has reduced the rate of medication errors by 41%.
The Technological Stack
InterSystems Cache, Ensemble, Objectscript, .NET, C#, MVC, Javascript, Ajax libraries