Integrating success:

What role can integrated technology play in helping to improve the safety, productivity and profitability of your nuclear medicine department?

The power of technology to help improve nuclear medicine.

Learn more from two perspectives: Joey Petrucci is Director, Pharmacy Technology and a board certified nuclear pharmacist. Bryon Scott is Manager, Technical Marketing and practiced as a nuclear medicine technologist in the hospital setting.

How does integrated technology improve patient safety?

Bryon Scott: When you think about it, the challenge of being a nuclear medicine technologist is not unlike a nurse on a hospital floor. Both want to spend as much time as possible caring for patients, not paperwork. So the aim of technology integration in nuclear medicine is to automate the tracking process, from “beginning to bedside.

By doing so, we help minimize the potential for human error when entering orders and administering doses. So improved patient safety is perhaps the greatest benefit of integration. At the same time, we’re relieving technologists from the burden of a lot of clerical duties. Data management alone takes a tremendous amount of time—entering, verifying and maintaining the same data in multiple systems.

Via integrated technology, nuclear medicine technologists have more time to do what they’re really trained to do: take care of patients and make them more comfortable during a difficult period in their lives.

What is the Cardinal Health approach to technology integration—and why is it important?

Joey Petrucci: We have created the first and only end-to-end solution available today for nuclear medicine documentation systems, called the Beginning to Bedside Patient Safety Solution™. It includes three key components:

  1. Isotrac: our barcode-enabled nuclear pharmacy management system used in Cardinal Health radiopharmacies. Isotrac governs product preparation, patient dose dispensing and quality control. Isotrac helps us achieves 99.99% dosing and labeling accuracy and 99.9% accurate and on-time delivery rates.
  2. Syntrac™ Integration Tools with HL7 integration: total radiopharmaceutical management for your nuclear medicine department, including patient scheduling, ordering integration, receiving RAM inventory and its management, custom reporting, Health Physics and much more. With HL7 integration, you can order and dose a patient seamlessly, without duplicate data entry.
  3. Safetrac™ Barcoding System: unique barcodes on our unit doses enable you to scan the radiopharmaceutical at the bedside to verify the drug matches the physician’s order on the patient’s medication administration record (MAR). So you can “check before you inject” and verify the patient’s Five Rights are being met.

This level of connectivity is not only critical—it’s unique. In the past, the nuclear pharmacy and nuclear medicine department systems typically didn’t have such strong and reliable interoperability. So processes were very manual, time consuming and prone to human error. There were no automatic verifications, and breaks in the patient chain of care were possible.

Those barriers to better outcomes are now a thing of the past.

What are the benefits of this end-to-end integration?

Joey Petrucci: As Bryon mentioned, we can reduce the potential for order entry and dose administration errors — which can have a significant impact in several ways. Let’s focus on the patient first.

Imagine you, as a patient, having a PET scan to see if your cancer is in remission. You have completed the last course of chemotherapy, and you’ve fasted to prepare for the scan. Then you learn the wrong drug was administered and you have to go through the entire process again! There’s not just the extra cost and hassle of rescheduling. There’s additional, unnecessary radiation exposure and emotional drain on the patient and his or her family, who have already been through a lot. As healthcare professionals, we don’t want to add to that burden.

Turning to the business side of your nuclear medicine department, you can help increase productivity by minimizing duplicate data entry and extra steps. In fact, you can reduce a technologist’s clerical workload by an average of one hour per day.4 Imagine the impact of having that extra time available for patient care: How many more studies could you perform? How much more time could a technologist spend with patients, improving both patient satisfaction and reimbursements?

There’s another strong benefit to leveraging your Electronic Health Records (EHR) for radiopharmaceutical administration: the evolution to value-based care and the government’s initiatives to track and maintain all patient records electronically. Right now, not all radiopharmaceuticals administered must be included in your EHR, but this could be mandated in the future to maximize your reimbursement.

Switching to a fully integrated system now can help you prepare for the future, while maximizing charge capture and improving coordination among caregivers today.

What other financial impact can integrated technology have?

Joey Petrucci: First, let’s talk about reputation. In today’s consumer driven healthcare environment, an institution’s reputation is everything. Even a single medication error can be devastating, and word gets out quickly. As patient satisfaction becomes an increasingly important metric in the world of value-based care, protecting your department’s reputation is essential to protecting your reimbursements. And nuclear medicine errors are a genuine risk.

Because the FDA doesn’t mandate barcoding for radiopharmaceuticals, they are vulnerable to potential dosing errors. Medication errors in radiology are seven times more likely to cause patient harm than errors in other hospital settings—and they can be costly. The average cost per incident is nearly $3,000.00, not including potential litigation.

It’s amazing that hospitals will barcode something as simple as an alcohol wipe to be scanned at the bedside—but not radiopharmaceuticals. That’s why we created the Safetrac™ Barcoding System as part of our end-to-end solution. As pharmacists ourselves, we believe patient safety must always come first.

Hospitals and health systems have already invested heavily in their EHR systems; why not use them to help improve safety in nuclear medicine?

Are there other advantages to your systems integration approach?

Bryon Scott: We believe having an end-to-end solution is so critical to the health of the patient and hospital alike that we’ve built one, from the ground up. We don’t rely on any third parties; every system asset is fully owned and operated by Cardinal Health. Joey likes to say it “completes the circle of care.

Owning the complete solution offers our customers several advantages:

  • A single point of contact for all activities; customers are never “lost in the shuffle.
  • Faster resolution of any issues, as they arise.
  • Because we have nuclear medicine technologists on staff who have worked in hospital settings, we understand the challenges you face. And because we own the complete, end-to-end solution, we have all the resources at hand to help address them successfully.
  • With our in-house nuclear medicine expertise, we’re also better able to anticipate future challenges, as value-based care continues to grow in importance. So we can help your nuclear medicine department thrive not only today, but also in the years ahead.
  1. Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) and NEHI, 2008. Saving Lives, Saving Money: The Imperative for CPOE in Massachusetts. Updated to 2008 figures. Cambridge, MA: NEHI, 2008. Available at www.nehi.net/ publications/8/saving_lives_saving_money_the_imperative_for_computerized_physician_order_entry_in_massachusetts_hospitals. Last accessed November 2010.
  2. Bates D, Cullen D, Laird N, et al. Incidence of Adverse Drug events and Potential Adverse Drug Events, JAMA. 1995; Vol 274, No. 1.
  3. Mongan JJ, Ferris TG, Lee TH. Options for slowing the growth of health care costs. N Engl J Med. 2008;358:1509–14. Hillestad R, Bigelow J, Bower A, Girosi F, Meili R, Scoville R, Taylor R. Can electronic medical record systems transform health care? Potential health benefits, savings, and costs. Health Aff (Millwood) 2005;24:1103–17.
  4. Cardinal Health Syntrac™ Integration Tools user experience. Calculated with $35.21 is the median hourly wage for an NMT. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).