Texas Children’s Hospital Leverages Technology and Automation ¬¬for Medication Management

Episode Highlights

Q: Please tell our audience about your pharmacy background and experience leading key areas in pharmacy and respiratory care at Texas Children's Hospital.

Jeff Wagner: I oversee our pharmacy, respiratory care, and ECMO services across Texas Children's Hospital. Texas Children's has three hospitals in the greater Houston area with nearly 900 licensed beds. According to the U.S. News and World Report, the system consistently ranks among the top children's hospitals in the United States. Across the enterprise, we have close to 5 million patient encounters and 35,000 inpatient admissions annually, especially for our pharmacy operations and a team of over 600. We rely on automation and advanced technology to support safe and efficient medication use processes and provide care to our community's children and women. As an innovative leader, Texas Children's has sought the most advanced technology available, including automated medication dispensing systems and robotics to interface directly with automated dispensing cabinets.

Q: Can you please tell us more about how you use pharmacy technology and automation at Texas Children’s?

Gee Mathen: We can track every node within our environment within the visibility piece. So, this is the first step into a multi-layered process as we move forward. Our goal is to track individual doses from all seven stages of the medication management process, from procurement, storage, ordering, dispensing, administration, monitoring, and reporting. So, all of these pieces start with automation, and technology is a crucial component. The software aligns it as well to integrate the systems. I think that’s key to the success we’re trying to drive here.

Q: Can you tell us more about your role and how Texas Children’s has used automation to transform your pharmacy to benefit your patients?

Gee Mathen: My role here is the fun part. I get to put in the technology and ensure that we accomplish the vision and dreams that Texas Children's have set forth before us. We're a leading pediatric hospital, and super excited that we're number two this year in the U.S. News and World Report. We want to keep our patients safe, especially when the lives of children, mothers, and babies are at stake.

We chose a central pharmacy dispensing service, an automated central pharmacy system, and robotics to gain all the benefits, including increased medication safety through 100 percent barcode scanning, heightened inventory visibility, decreased redundant tasks, and reduced medication waste.

Texas Children's was already using automated dispensing cabinets to dispense about 1.3 million doses annually. Before we adopted the extra two automated central pharmacy systems from Omnicell, the hospital used a different solution to restock cabinets. The solution caused medication waste, was error-prone, and excessively relied on pharmacy personnel for manual labor and inconsistent practices. With the substantial use of automated dispensing cabinets, we needed to simplify the patient-specific dispensing process of the new automated central pharmacy system to improve the ADC restocking procedure to drive visibility and efficiency in drug dispensing throughout our healthcare system.

Q: Recognizing the difficulties in previous restocking workflows, what solution did you identify and implement?

Jeff Wagner: We partnered with our medication management technology partner to employ the automated central pharmacy system to fit our institution's specific requirements by dispensing patient-specific and cabinet restock medications to address the problems with previous restocking processes.

Q: How did you prepare to deploy the pioneering workflow at your hospital?

Gee Mathen: Over two years ago, Texas Children's and Omnicell collaborated on the automated central pharmacy system and robotics, which was improved to restock ADCs. Jeff and I had the privilege of going and taking a look at this in the early inception stages. When we saw it, we said, hey, our future will be different. It was a light bulb moment. Our pharmacy informatics teams ran several tests to ensure a smooth transition. When we finally moved forward with our new robots. They developed a workflow to restock the ADCs from the automated central pharmacy system. We also had interdepartmental cooperation amongst the executives, pharmacy informatics team, pharmacy inventory team, and other participants. They were all essential to the workflow's success.

Q: When and where did you begin the new workflow? And can you walk our listeners through a typical day of that workflow?

Gee Mathen: The cabinets are organized by the areas they service. The autom...