Compiling medication data is an important aspect of patient care, requiring clinicians to pull from many different sources. Incomplete information is frustrating for nurses because it takes significant time and effort to fill in the gaps manually.
DrFirst aims to change that. The company's technology leverages AI to automate medication history-gathering by pulling data from multiple sources, including local pharmacies and health information exchanges, and populating the information into the EHR. This eliminates the need for manual entry and reduces the known errors that come from human intervention.
"We have a more complete data stream we are bringing in, and then we clean the data," said Colin Banas, MD, chief medical officer of DrFirst, March 1 during a sponsored session at the Becker's Clinical Leadership + Pharmacy Virtual Forum. "Of course we need to get rid of the duplicates, we need to float the most relevant information up to the top, and we need to make sure that it's readable because we're going to set it up to be consumable."
Jillian Foster, PharmD, vice president of pharmacy at Memphis, Tenn.-based Baptist Memorial Health Care and Thomas Pickering, PharmD, administrative coordinator of transitions of care for Cone Health in Greensboro, N.C., joined Dr. Banas for the discussion. Both are DrFirst clients who reported workflow efficiencies after implementing the technology.
Dr. Foster said Baptist Memorial used a different company to populate its online medication feed when the system installed Epic EHR seven years ago. Back then, the system primarily relied on nurses to enter information manually into their system, and they were excited to automate the process. However, shortly after install the excitement turned into frustration because there were inaccuracies and discrepancies in the data coming through.
Baptist Memorial eventually turned medication data feed off because there were too many complications. Then Dr. Foster learned about DrFirst and went live with the system in 2019.
"We were really happy to turn the medication data feed back on and use DrFirst," she said. "Our teams feel a lot more equipped to have a good starting point when we're interviewing patients. It's certainly been a positive thing for us. The ability to pull in some independent pharmacies around our network that had not previously been included in our data was also a big win for us."
Dr. Pickering said he noticed a big improvement in gathering complete information after installing DrFirst.
"My staff is definitely spending less time confirming missing information and less time interviewing patients," said Dr. Pickering. "There's not as many instances where they have to interrupt the interview, go outside the room and make a call to the pharmacy for a fax. It's a one-stop interview, like we always envisioned it would be."
Click here to view the entire session on-demand.
Click here to learn more about DrFirst.
More articles on health IT:
Amazon Care, Intermountain, Ascension launch hospital-at-home healthcare alliance
DOD adds 6,000 new users to Cerner EHR
Highmark Health inks 6-year partnership with Google sister company Verily: 6 notes