HIT Consultant: Helping VA to Combat Infectious Disease Across the Full Continuum of Care
One of the biggest challenges that VA hospitals and clinicians face is that they provide Veterans with 100 percent of care services throughout their lifetimes.
Unlike commercial hospitals, this focus on the full continuum of care includes everything from specialty care at VA clinics for chronic conditions to fulfilling prescriptions to acute hospital admissions and/or ER visits to end-of-life care in a VA community living centers/nursing homes.
In addition to this wide-range of care, the amount of Veterans that require care is very high. For example, in VISN4, there are nine VA Medical Centers serving 322,000 Veterans, 38,000 inpatient admissions per year, 3.7 million outpatient visits, and 6.7 million prescriptions filled yearly.
With this heavy workload, clinicians face burnout with the sheer volume of patients seen daily, and errors are bound to occur. Clinicians need tools to aggregate data across the VISN to assist clinicians in delivering efficient and accurate patient care.
These were the key themes of a recent HIT Consultant guest article by Diane Ratner, Senior Product Line Manager of TheraDoc, DSS, Inc. The article also focused on the need for appropriate medication management, which includes choosing the right medication to treat an infection, which prevents a patient from developing antibiotic resistance, and/or an adverse drug event that can be life threatening.
Medication management also encompasses choosing lower cost drugs that are equally as effective, as well as judicious use of controlled substances such as opioids and benzodiazepines.
Diane also highlighted how solutions like TheraDoc provide the ability for immediate and accurate medical intervention, which currently is challenging due to the VA’s huge and dispersed population of patients – inpatient and outpatient.
TheraDoc is currently being used in 43 VA medical facilities, including 3 VISN-wide deployments, and the results have been dramatic. For example, over a period of only 30 days in VISN4 (nine sites), the software application facilitated 1,230 pharmacy interventions for appropriate patient care and medication management, and saved the VISN approximately $732,000.
The article also shined a light on how TheraDoc provides opioid and controlled substance monitoring for inpatients and outpatients. It can also aggregate data specific to treatment goals and parameters set by the VA Opioid Safety Initiative (OSI), and presents the data in a usable, actionable format for clinicians at the point of care.
As the VA faces care challenges that are much larger in scope than the commercial arena, fortunately there are solutions that can help with combating infectious disease, as well as provide appropriate medication management including controlled substances/opioids.
Read Diane’s full article here. To learn more about TheraDoc and DSS’s full suite of solutions for federal health, please click here.