Hospital to reduce costs, streamline productivity and improve safety
ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Building on the success of its existing McKesson pharmacy solutions, Allegiance Health in Jackson, Mich., has become the latest organization to choose McKesson’s industry-leading distribution and automation solutions to completely automate its pharmacy. The hospital plans to replace its long-standing pharmaceutical-distribution vendor with McKesson, which has a 99.998% distribution accuracy rate and delivers one-third of all medications used each day in North America. McKesson also is the market leader in central pharmacy automation for hospitals, with more than 1,000 customers in the U.S. and Canada.
Allegiance Health already uses a complete portfolio of McKesson clinical and operational pharmacy solutions spanning all areas of the hospital. The organization has experienced significant patient and medication-safety benefits with McKesson’s ROBOT-Rx® and MedCarousel® medication dispensing systems. Now, the hospital will add McKesson PROmanager-Rx™, Fulfill-RxSM, McKesson ConnectSM and McKesson Connect Link to further improve safety and increase productivity across the care continuum.
“Our goal is to automate as much of the medication-distribution process as possible so we can maximize efficiencies and shift our focus to high-value clinical services,” said Tom Crampton, pharmacy director, Allegiance Health. “With McKesson’s bar-code-based solutions, we’ll be able to save on labor costs and further streamline our ordering and dispensing processes while increasing safety.”
PROmanager-Rx is the only pharmacy robot on the market that stores and dispenses oral solid medications pre-packaged by the manufacturer in unit-dose, bar-coded form. By combining the automated medication dispensing system with its existing McKesson systems, Allegiance Health expects to reduce time and costs for packaging and dispensing verification. Nearly all unit dose medications will be automatically dispensed without human intervention and verified via bar-code scanning before leaving the pharmacy, assuring the highest level of accuracy and patient safety.
In addition, with Fulfill-Rx, McKesson Connect and McKesson Connect Link, Allegiance Health can leverage a perpetual inventory system that will eliminate the manual process of tracking and replenishing inventory associated with automated dispensing cabinets. Ultimately, Allegiance Health will be able to benefit from increased visibility and medication availability, thus lowering inventory costs and drug spend, reducing dispensing errors, and improving pharmacy staff efficiencies.
“The foundation of medication safety begins with optimizing pharmacy operations,” said Chris Dollar, president, McKesson Automation. “By working with McKesson, Allegiance Health can leverage our integrated supply chain management capability to achieve lower costs for the hospital in addition to evolving their operations so they can deliver more and better patient care to their community.”
About Allegiance Health
Allegiance Health is a community-owned and locally-governed health system serving the people of south central Michigan with high-quality health care for more than 90 years. Comprised of nearly 50 facilities, the system reaches residents of Jackson, Hillsdale, Lenawee, Ingham, Calhoun and Washtenaw counties and beyond. The organization believes its community is best served with safe, advanced medical services and strives to fulfill its mission each day “to lead the community to better health and well-being at every stage of life.”
About McKesson
McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 15th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to making the business of healthcare run better. We partner with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson helps its customers improve their financial, operational and clinical performance with solutions that include pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management, healthcare information technology, and business and clinical services. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.
CONTACT:
McKesson
Yancey Casey, 404-338-2468
[email protected]
KEYWORDS: United States North America Georgia
INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Technology Software Practice Management Health Hospitals Pharmaceutical
MEDIA: