Clini-Doc has been a very valuable addition to our pharmacy department. I have been using it for just over a year now and I must say that it has become something that I depend on to do my job.
Clini-Doc is helpful in two different but related areas. The first area is patient care. Clini-Doc comes with many useful calculators that eliminate the need to remember formulas for calculations such as corrected sodium values or creatinine clearance. Also included are calculators to help dose vancomycin and aminoglycoside antibiotics. You have the flexibility to calculate initial doses or make dosage adjustments based on serum levels. Calculating creatinine clearance and checking an antibiotic’s dosage are the two calculators that I find myself using the most, but the other ones included certainly have served their purpose on more than one occasion.
The second area that Clini-Doc is useful is in documenting clinical interventions and generating reports about those interventions. We have a saying in the pharmacy that we frequently use in regard to patient care: if it hasn’t been documented, it hasn’t been done. Clini-Doc provides a very complex but simple method of documenting interventions. Most of the entry is menu driven so typing is minimal, but many areas can be customized to add flexibility. On top of all of this, Clini-Doc assigns a dollar amount to the cost savings for each intervention. An almost limitless set of customized reports can be generated to display the information. These reports can be used by pharmacy directors to evaluate the performance of their pharmacists, but more importantly they are a vital tool in showing hospital administrators the worth and professionalism of the pharmacy department. By seeing actual numbers on paper that show the economic impact that pharmacy can have on hospital costs can be a real eye-opener for management. This also provides an excellent opportunity to reinforce to them that the majority of these cost savings is not directly related to drug expenditures, but rather to a patient’s decreased length of stay and avoidance of adverse reactions. To put it quite frankly, pharmacy plays a vital role in helping the hospital make sure the patient receives the best care possible, and gets better as quickly as possible.
Clini-Doc truly lives up to its name. It has helped me validate my worth to the pharmacy department and to the hospital.
Shan Hardage, Pharm.D., BCPS
National Park Medical Center
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Clini-Doc is a must-have for every hospital pharmacy department. The web-based and PDA functionality make it quick and easy to document a pharmacist’s impact on patient outcomes in a real-time basis.
As a pharmacist my favorite tool is the call log, which allows immediate clarification of pending issues with the physician whether the call is returned to the department or a clinical practice area.
As a manager I appreciate the ingenuity and flexibility of this system, which allows for easy integration into the daily workload of the entire staff. Reports can then be generated on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis to share with them. The intervention volume and dollar amounts give them a sense of pride and they feel good about their hard work.
The quarterly reports and benchmarks not only provide the hospital’s quality and medical staff committees with productivity and dollar impact of the pharmacy department, it provides physician-specific data, e.g. quantifying collaborative relationships and documenting prevented adverse drug events.
Janelle Berg, Pharm.D. BCPS
Clinical Manager, Residency Program Director
Mercy Hospital, Miami
"Using the Clini-Doc Program has made my job of not only quantifying
the interventions that I make easier; but also allows me to better
account and document time spent involved with other functions
throughout the day, such as interdisciplinary rounds, meetings, etc.
Formulating answers to questions such as which physicians are involved
with
the use of unapproved abbreviations has been made much easier through generating a report by making a couple of clicks in the report
generator.
The ease of use is another quality that I hold in high esteem. The
program
comes with multiple pre-loaded intervention types which allows the
user to quickly determine the intervention type and go about with the documentation
process. Having the PDA to document at point of service is also a key
quality.
Last but certainly not least, the customer support is second to none. Questions that arise are handled in an exceptionally friendly and
timely manner."
Mark Harris, PharmD
Clinical Coordinator
Southwest Iowa Medical Center
Contemporary issues facing healthcare institutions today focus heavily on balancing treatment costs and patient outcomes. Clinicians and administrators must work together on complex issues of clinical care and economics. That balance should assist organizations in achieving their goals of providing optimal patient centered care. Achieving this balance requires the implementation of evidence based medicine along with access to the appropriate data that will help define both patient outcomes as well as cost.
Published literature strongly indicates that increased clinical pharmacists per occupied bed reduces medication errors, mortality, length of stay, drug costs and overall cost of care through interventions. However, in most organizations, the productivity of pharmacists is primarily based on the number of doses dispensed or patient days. Clearly, this severely underestimates the value of clinical pharmacy services. Clini-Doc has been a major catalyst in defining the "true" role of the pharmacists within our institution. The qualitative and quantitative data from our first quarter was presented to our hospital administration with a proposal to include pharmacy interventions into the productivity measure. Along with acceptance of that proposal came a major restructure within the pharmacy department that focused on optimizing the pharmacist's clinical role.
Clini-Doc has been an effective tool that has allowed Saint Alphonsus Clinical Pharmacy Services to develop an evidenced based, data driven strategy to improve patient outcomes and control costs. Access to this type of data has allowed us the ability to optimize the medication use process through evaluation of appropriate medication use, adverse drug events as well as medication errors. When applied well, the data can offer significant insights into improving medication use and decreasing errors. Saint Alphonsus pharmacists strive to be resources for doctors, nurses, and patients to increase quality of care and improve patient outcomes. The success of our clinical intervention program is a result of teamwork, service to physicians, a passion for medication safety and of course, access to interventional data. Thanks Clini-Doc.
John Thomas, Pharm. D.
Critical Care Pharmacist
Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center
