US News and World Report recently published its annual “America’s Best Hospitals” issue. Reading the report, I was proud that 167 of the 170 listed hospitals are customers of Baxa. In addition, the majority of these leading hospitals rely on Baxa for their multi-ingredient compounding of TPN, cardioplegia and other custom large-volume IV solutions. In particular, this issue featured a wonderful profile of Vanderbilt University Hospital. When I joined Baxa in the summer of 1993, Vanderbilt happened to be the very first Baxa customer I visited with long-time Baxa Account Manager, Valerie Mainguy. Reading this profile made me realize that while it seems like yesterday, it has been fifteen years! It really hit me then what tremendous progress has been made in healthcare. Not just at the large academic teaching hospitals, but at hospitals all over the US. In fact, we are seeing a high degree of focus on medication safety in nearly every market we serve worldwide.
Not only has fifteen years passed since I first visited Vanderbilt, but nine years have gone by since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued its landmark report on patient safety. Time is definitely flying by. But, at the same time, it probably takes about a decade of work to process and react to the challenges laid out by something as challenging as the IOM study. Indeed, a huge cultural shift is happening in healthcare. Hospitals are getting more and more traction in the elimination of medical misadventures. Given healthcare professionals’ heavy workloads – particularly pharmacists and pharmacy technicians – just delivering care and keeping operations going day-to-day requires tremendous effort.
I applaud you and celebrate the success all of our customers are having in making medication delivery and administration safer. And, we all know there is a long way to go to achieve the vision of a completely error-proof and fail-safe process. Specifically, Abacus™, our order entry and calculating software, is the front line of safety for Baxa automated compounders. We’ve put in place a dedicated team under Perry Crumbaker, VP of Customer Operations, that focuses on optimizing the use of Abacus and its many safety features. This includes working with all of our existing Abacus customers to ensure they establish appropriate institutional warning limits for intrinsic ingredients in neonatal, pediatric and adult TPN templates and ancillary solution templates for solutions such as cardioplegia and rapid dialysis fluid replacement.
With such a high proportion of the TPN compounding done with Baxa systems, we know that stopping errors at the point of order entry is a key factor in ensuring that your hospital eliminates medication errors in the compounding of patient-specific TPN and other large-volume sterile solutions. Time is flying by, so I urge you to make time to audit your Abacus setup and work with our experts to ensure that you have put in place the right clinical decision support information and are using the software’s safety capabilities to the fullest extent possible.
We recognize that are extremely busy, and partners like Baxa are always coming to you with a barrage of product updates, safety notices and best practice recommendations. However, the time you invest to work with our team of experts on Abacus could have a dramatic impact on your peace of mind and error prevention. In the coming months, they’ll be contacting you to discuss your Abacus setup. If you’re concerned and want to move forward immediately, give us a call and we’ll get you scheduled.
As always, I invite your comments.
Sincerely,
Greg Baldwin
Chairman and CEO, Baxa Corporation
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