A large, 27-hospital health system like Advocate Aurora Health always is seeking operational efficiency – with patient safety top of mind. Health systems always are trying to improve no matter where the baseline may be.
THE PROBLEM
Within a large health system, it’s essential to integrate technology vertically and horizontally within the organization – and this integration needs to be effective with the electronic health record, said Kersten Weber Tatarelis, PharmD, vice president of pharmacy operations at Advocate Aurora Health.
“After making some rather aggressive decisions about unifying our electronic health records, we evaluated how we wanted to automate and integrate,” she recalled. “We knew we could gain operational efficiency by making broader and bolder decisions with our medication management platforms.
“In addition to gaining efficiencies in pharmacy and nursing operational workflows, we were very interested in inventory management optimization,” she continued. “Advocate Aurora has a central distribution center with 27 primary hospitals. We wanted to work universally, rather than in parallel, and see into our facilities to reduce overhead further and drive costs down.”
Finally, a problem the health system always had struggled with was data management and analytics, as have many organizations its size. Aligning on one platform would allow it to extract the same information and further analyze it to improve operational efficiency and optimize patient safety, she added.
PROPOSAL
Recently, Advocate Aurora Health rolled out Pyxis Logistics from technology vendor BD across all 27 Advocate Aurora hospitals, allowing the organization to operate efficiently from a central distribution process in a hub-and-spoke model and drive some of those inventory-management cost savings, Weber Tatarelis explained.
“And we can maximize our inventory-management optimization using BD HealthSight Inventory Optimization Analytics, enable data extraction and use big data for PAR-level optimization,” she said.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Advocate Aurora Health implemented BD Pyxis Logistics to help address its inventory management challenges. That allowed the organization to roll out BD HealthSight Inventory Optimization Analytics to help ensure it has more inventory control from a central function compared to previous workflows.
The pharmacy supply chain team primarily manages it. With this central distribution center, the health system has maximized the entire workflow and now has a line of sight to big data.
“Driving change in a meaningful way requires a dedicated analytics team to extract the data and translate it into a digestible format for the end user.”
Kersten Weber Tatarelis, PharmD, Advocate Aurora Health
