The other morning, before my staff arrived to work for the day, I took a phone call from one of the group homes we service. They wanted to know if we had received an order for a dose change on a patient’s sertraline. I looked in our systems and concluded that we had not yet received an order. It turns out that I was mistaken. Deconstructing my mistake illustrates a time honored saying: If you didn’t document it, you didn’t do it!
Where’s Waldo?
Like any busy work environment, knowing where to look for information is the key to success. There are limited ways the order in question, a prescription, can arrive:
- A faxed in prescription
- A mailed in prescription.
- An electronic prescription
- A phoned in prescription
- A hand-written prescription brought in by the patient
Once an order has been processed, documentation should be found on the pharmacy management system (PMS). At our pharmacies, the old prescription would be discontinued, and a new prescription would be entered with the new directions. This is what I expected to find if we had processed the order.
Our pharmacy also uses a clinical documentation system, PharmClin, to document all activities as they relate to drug therapy. Any notes or pending issues related to a dose change should be documented in this system. This additional documentation is very valuable to us as it allows us to document many of the important details that complete the clinical story as they relate to the patient’s drug therapy. PharmClin makes this information easily accessible and retrievable.
I went searching. I found no unprocessed orders. The original order on our PMS still active, and no new prescriptions for sertraline were present. There were also no notes in PharmClin related to a dose change of sertraline. In other words, I did not find Waldo. Based on a lack of evidence, we did not appear to have the order yet.
When my staff pharmacist arrived, I mentioned the call and was informed that she was aware of the order and that it had already been addressed and picked up. I was flummoxed! How could this be? As it turned out, the situation was a lot more complicated than the phone call suggested.
The Details
The patient was taking 200 mg of sertraline daily. The previous day, prescriber decided to switch the patient to escitalopram. My pharmacist correctly identified that the patient should not simply stop taking the sertraline without some attempt to taper the dosage over time and contacted the prescriber’s office. She was told that the prescriber did indeed tell the house staff to taper the dose of the sertraline and provided a flow sheet of the taper. In other words, there was no prescription written to decrease or taper the sertraline. As Homer Simpson says, DOH!
Continuous Quality Improvement
Multiple mistakes were made here. My first mistake was not asking additional questions of the house staff that called. I made the assumption that we were looking for a dose change for sertraline and failed to see the new Rx for the escitalopram. The other omissions were made before I received the call: the sertraline order was not discontinued in the PMS, and the communication with the prescriber was not documented in PharmClin.
The scenario above an epidemic in today’s healthcare environment. The patient is told something by a primary provider, and other providers do not receive notice. The communication from the prescriber to the pharmacy, a form of documentation, was missing. Despite this, my staff pharmacist who dealt with the problem discovered all of the details after they spent time on the problem the previous day. But like the first omission, her documentation was incomplete and largely missing.
Having an tool like PharmClin to document clinical interventions is a great asset to a pharmacy. But if the tool is not used, the benefits are lost. Pharmacists across the country make outstanding interventions every day. The fact is, however, that they largely fail to document their work. In a small pharmacy with few employees, mentally keeping track of issues like this might be manageable, but eventually the system will fail. In a larger pharmacy with many more employees and patients, a systematic documentation system is a must. Remember…Do It. Document it. Done! This is how you can make every encounter count!
