Beaumont Receives Award for Medication Barcoding Implementation

A systemwide safety initiative to implement barcoding to administer medication at Beaumont Health System helped to prevent a total of 23,500 potential drug errors from December 2011 through July 2012.

The ambitious project led by Beaumont’s Information Technology department was recognized with the 2012 Transformational Leadership Award, sponsored by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the American Hospital Association. Beaumont received the award Oct. 19 at the CHIME12 Fall CIO Forum in Indian Wells, Calif.

With an estimated 400,000 preventable drug-related injuries in hospitals a year, resulting in $3.5 billion in unnecessary medical costs, Beaumont made medication error prevention a strategic imperative for improving patient safety, quality and cost at its three hospitals.

Using a phased-in approach, leaders of Beaumont’s IT, Nursing, Pharmacy and Quality departments worked together to roll-out the medication barcoding implementation – from scanning incoming pharmaceutical products to training nursing staff. They began with Beaumont’s 250-bed community hospital in Grosse Pointe, followed by its 406-bed hospital in Troy and lastly at Beaumont’s 1,070-bed flagship hospital in Royal Oak.

Now each Beaumont patient has a unique bar code that only exists on their wristband, which helps to protect the integrity of the positive patient identification and medication barcode process. The system also alerts the nurse if the medication order is expired, discontinued, or if it’s the wrong medication or the wrong patient.

“Beaumont was the first health system in Michigan, and one of the first in the nation, to achieve electronic health record meaningful use requirements in 2011,” says Gene Michalski, president and CEO, Beaumont Health System. “That accomplishment set the stage for our successful implementation of a barcoding medication system that is preventing potential medication errors each and every day at Beaumont’s three hospitals. Our patients are safer and our health system is spared the high costs of preventable drug-related injuries as a result.”

The Transformational Leadership Award was created to acknowledge outstanding transformational leadership using IT in health care. Presented jointly to both the CIO and CEO, the award recognizes an organization that has excelled in developing and deploying information technology that improves the delivery of care and streamlines administrative services

“We are honored to receive the prestigious CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award,” says Subra Sripada, executive vice president, chief administrative and chief information officer, Beaumont Health System. “This is a team win. Our IT staff worked closely with members of our Nursing, Quality and Pharmacy teams in deploying this technology. This collaboration was key to making the project successful. We are committed to continue looking for ways to leverage technology in advancing our patient safety and quality goals and driving down our costs of delivery of care”.

For more information about the CHIME-AHA Transformational Leadership Award, visit http://www.cio-chime.org/scholarshipandrecognition/LeadershipAward.asp.