How Pharma EHRs Can Help to Prevent Dangerous Drug Interactions

Digitalizing the healthcare operation has opened the gateway to more new opportunities, innovations, and automation in the healthcare industry, including challenges as well.

One such digitalized solution is the EHR, which helps the healthcare practice, providers, and staff to manage patient’s health records and automate the healthcare administration. 

While the EHR system makes workflow easier for practices and clinics, the pharmacies also need the same for maximum workflow efficiency. The inefficiency in medication management leads to dangerous drug interactions that could risk the patient’s life.

However, with the help of the EHR system, pharmacies can prevent dangerous drug interactions in patients’ medication. In this blog post, we’ll walk through How customized EHR systems for pharmacies help to prevent dangerous drug interactions.

What is a Pharma EHR System?

Firstly, let’s have a quick overview of what is EHR. The Electronic Health Records (EHR) system is the digitalized version of traditional paper health records of patients.

There are times when providers note all the essential details in the paper and manage them throughout the diagnosis. EHR system helps to digitalize paper records, making it easier for healthcare providers to manage and organize all the patient records in one place.

Now, What is EHR for Pharmacies? The EHR system is specially customized for pharmacies to meet their needs and requirements. In this way, pharmacists can efficiently communicate with the providers for better health care and medication management.

Related: EHR Adoption in Ambulatory Care: Benefits, Challenges, and Best Practices

Benefits of Pharmacy EHR

From reducing the risk of medication errors to improving efficiency in the administration, EHRs provide a vast range of advantages for pharmacies.

Here are a few benefits of Pharma EHR:

• EHR promotes better coordination between all healthcare departments to be involved in the patient’s healthcare, reducing the chance of readmissions.
• Pharmacists can have complete detailed patient medication history and up-to-date information to reduce potential drug adverse events.
• EHR system enables complete patient medical information in one place, making it easier for pharmacists to report.
• EHR systems can automate, organize, and manage patients’ health records, ultimately reducing the pharmacist’s and staff member’s workload and streamlining workflow.
• EHR helps to validate and improve accuracy in medical prescriptions and reduces medication errors.

How Pharmacy EHR Helps to Prevent Potential Drug Interactions

1. Drug-Drug Interaction Checking

The EHR system has a load of extensive libraries of drug information including known interactions. When a pharmacist enters a new patient prescription, the EHR system can automatically check any potentially dangerous drug interactions with the patient’s existing medications.

2. Drug Allergy Checking

With the help of EHR, the pharmacist can store the patient’s medication allergies. After entering the new prescription of patients, the EHR system will cross-check against the patient’s medication allergies to avoid prescribing medication to patients who are allergic.

3. Dosing Error Prevention

EHR system has a built-in decision support tool that indicates to pharmacists if a prescribed dosage is unsafe based on patient height, weight, and other crucial factors. This helps to catch potential overdoses or dosing errors.

4. Duplicate Therapy Checking

The EHR system can flag situations where the patient is receiving two drugs in the same class. This ensures the prevention of overmedication.

5. Drug Lab Interaction Alerts

EHRs can incorporate lab values like blood work into their checking. For instance, the EHR system will warn the pharmacists if a prescribed drug may negatively interact with liver enzymes based on the patients’ up-to-date lab results.

6. Documentation and Coordination

Complete documentation helps coordinate care between pharmacists, doctors, and other providers to better understand what medication the patient is receiving. This ultimately improves overall safety when prescribing new medication to patients.

Pharmacies can leverage EHR to digitalize and automate the administration to add safeguards that protect patients from medication errors and adverse drug events and improve overall pharmaceutical safety.

Related: AI-Powered Documentation Assistance: Automating Charting and Note-Taking in EHR Portals

Challenges with Pharma EHR System

Though the pharma EHR system offers a vast range of benefits and potentially helps to prevent drug interactions, it also has challenges for pharmacies.

1. Cost Burdens

The Adoption and Implementation of EHR in Pharmacies involves huge up-front and ongoing costs for hardware, software, IT Infrastructure, training for staff members, and ongoing technical support. Small pharmacy care practices may not be able to invest.

Solution: Consider leveraging the federal incentives for EHR adoption. Prioritize the core functions of the pharmacy first to adopt the EHR system based on the requirements, then expand the capabilities over time. Consider cloud-based EHR systems to reduce IT infrastructure costs.

2. Incomplete Patient Medication Histories

Pharmacy staff members find it daunting is enter complete and accurate patient’s medication histories leads to critical patient safety.

Solution: However, EHR systems have automated data entry features that will gather patients’ medication histories and enter them automatically. This will reduce the manual data entry work.

3. Workflow Disruption

The Pharmacists and staff members might already be familiar with the traditional paper records method. Making a transition from paper records to a digitalized solution can ultimately disrupt the pharmacy workflow and reduce productivity.

Solution: Pharmacies must consider starting with the basic adoption instead of completely transitioning from paperwork to digital at once. This won’t reduce the workflow disruption. Moreover, consider providing comprehensive training sessions and ongoing support to staff members. Additionally, customize the EHR system to match the existing pharmacy workflows.

Vozo EHR System for Pharmacies

Choosing the right EHR system is crucial for impact. If you are searching for the best EHR system to implement for your Pharmacy, Vozo EHR can be your go-to solution. Vozo EHR will help you to:

• Streamline and automate the Pharmacy workflow
• Seamless transition from paper records to EHR
• Efficient medication management
• Cost-effective subscription plans that benefit all levels of pharmacies
• 24/7 Tech team support to assist you in your needs.
• Accurate reporting and data analysis
• Clinical decision support tools to improve diagnostic accuracy
• Vozo EHR scale as your pharmacy grows

Trust in Vozo EHR as we reduce your burdens and let you focus more on better medication management.