The electronic medication administration record (eMAR) has gained a foothold in inpatient settings to support medication administration safety. With paper records prone to being lost, incomplete, or misread, the bedside nurse needs a fail-safe method to ensure that medications are administered correctly. Medication administration systems that integrate fully with computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and pharmacy systems should provide that fail-safe system, while improving efficiency. Even a standalone medication administration system is a vast improvement over paper medication administration records.
But for medication administration safety the eMAR is only as good as the drug database that supports it. First DataBank's
National Drug Data File Plus (NDDF Plus) is the most comprehensive and up-to-date in the industry. Widely used in hospital systems throughout the country—a clear indication of the trust we've earned in our 30 years as a pioneering industry leader—we've built NDDF Plus from the ground up to offer each of the players in the drug therapy workflow clear and trustworthy drug information in language tailored to their specific clinical and practical needs.
Reducing Errors, Improving Hospital Efficiency
Within a hospital, drug therapies need to move quickly and accurately from the prescribing physician to the dispensing pharmacist and then to the bedside where the nurse typically administers the drug. As the medication administration safety check of last resort, ideally the nurse can access all available data on patient medications and their administration, and reconcile the physician's order with what the pharmacy has actually dispensed.
Innovative First DataBank modules allow the bedside nurse to achieve all those goals with remarkable ease and efficiency. With our
OrderView Med Knowledge Base, nurses can see the exact order from the physician and then navigate to exactly the items that need to be administered in the context of patient records that prompt appropriate actions and alerts. Because we incorporate flexible categories for drug-drug, drug-allergy, and drug-food interactions, you can use a range of techniques to fine tune alerts, specifically for the nurse, without compromising patient safety. And our drug content also facilitates FDA-mandated bar code scanning.
In addition, if the system is a closed loop among CPOE, pharmacy dispensing, and bedside charting, First DataBank facilitates specific views on the medication universe for the pharmacist, physician and nurse.