IMPLEMENTATION OF AN AUTOMATED ANTICOAGULATION ALERTING SYSTEM
Is decreasing patient length of stay by 23 hours significant to your hospital?
EDMONDS, Wash. – June 1, 2021 – At a large 515-bed Southern California hospital, M2 Information Systems was contracted to assist with developing and implementing an automated alerting system for anticoagulation monitoring. At the time, the current manual model of evaluating clinical laboratory values for patients on heparin was delayed by many hours as they were reported in the EMR.
It was hypothesized that automating alerts vs. periodic manual review would help patients achieve stable and ideal coagulation status faster, decrease VTE’s, expedite dose-adjustment, as well is decreasing discharge time to outpatient coagulation monitoring.
We conducted a retrospective data analysis on a total of 320 patients over a 12-month period, 6 months before instituting automated alerting, and 6 months after, to compare heparin orders, and time to reach stabilized coagulation factors, such as INR and aPTT values.
We reviewed 157 consecutive patients on anticoagulation therapy, before automated alerting, and 164 consecutive anticoagulation ordered patients after alerting.
Our results demonstrated that prior to introduction of the automated alerting system the time to achieve ideal coagulation status averaged 140 hours while time after alerting decreased to 104 hours.
Additionally, we observed an on-average length of stay reduction of 23 hours.
The significance of these results represents both a beneficial change in patient care, as well as a meaningful cost savings. We estimated the cost savings during this two-year period of $1.7 million.
Would automated alerting of critical lab values be helpful to your clinical teams?
About M2
M2 Information Systems, Inc. is based in the Seattle area and has been developing, installing and supporting hospital applications in the U.S. for 30+ years. M2 began developing PC based order management and resulting systems for hospitals in 1983. In the early 90’s they focused exclusively on clinical workflow applications for larger facilities. M2 developed the first hospital web-based clinical systems and has now coalesced that knowledge and experience into MicroBloggingMD (MBMD). Additional information is available at: www.m2is.com.
About MicroBloggingMD
MicroBloggingMD is a clinical event driven, mobile alert and messaging technology with intelligent and customizable decision support. Subscriptions are used to generate specifically configured messages for clinical events with suggested best practices or standards based responses. All information is processed and delivered via a secure, patented conduit to the centerpiece of the application, MicroBloggingMD. The microblog is accessible via most mobile devices, smart phones or tablets. Additional information is available at www.microbloggingmd.com..