Products
Products - DPG
Dynamic PracticeGuidance™ Module (DPG)
With increased regulatory oversight and the market rapidly moving to a pay-for-performance model, the ability to automate monitoring and reporting on adherence to existing hospital guidelines and clinical best practices is becoming an operational necessity. Increasingly, hospitals are finding that written documentation of hospital guidelines with retrospective analysis without the ability to monitor and alert in real time is no longer sufficient in today’s demanding environment.
The Dynamic PracticeGuidance™ Module (DPG) is an automated system that monitors for and supports patient care compliance based upon your hospital’s clinical best practices and established guidelines. DPG sends real time alerts to the clinical staff only when the hospital’s clinical guidelines are not being met. This early warning provides valuable time for corrective clinical action, if indicated, to be taken. However, the system is also sensitive to the time constraints of the clinicians and only alerts to clinical issues within an appropriate timeframe tailored to the specific event. This enables alerting sensitivity to be adjusted down to the level of the clinician, ensuring that the right information is received only when it is required.
The same features that give the Dynamic PharmacoVigilance® Module (DPV) its flexibility, clarity and ease of use are embedded in DPG. The core component of DPG is a real time rule engine that is activated by a wide range of clinical data inputs. A DPG rule is a set of clinical parameters. Each rule has an initiating event, and expects a solution event to occur within a specific time frame specified within the rule. Associated events and other filters may be added to the rule to add increased specificity. A basic example of this is a blood culture received with sensitivity data, with the solution event to place the patient on an appropriate, cost-effective antibiotic within 2 hours. If the guidance built into the rule is not followed in the allocated time there will be a warning period then an alert with electronic notification. The DPG rules can be defined and tailored to meet the specific needs of each hospital and its clinicians.
Key Features of DPG
- Continuous monitoring of a wide range of clinical inputs: drugs, labs (wet and microbiology), vital signs, diagnoses, procedures, etc.
- DPG operates on dedicated VigiLanz systems, continuously monitoring 24/7 for exceptions in real time. There is no operational overhead or impact on your existing HIT systems.
- All inputs come from the hospital’s current clinical systems via a one way feed, so there is no re-entering of your clinical data. In addition, the rules themselves are designed, built and maintained by the clinicians who will be using them, not IT. This minimizes the time demand on IT and provides greater flexibility for the hospital’s clinical and administrative staff.
- Alerting on exceptions to clinical guidelines is based upon optimal, evidence-based practice norms. A library of rules built by other clinicians is provided “out of the box” along with the ability to build your own unique rules specific to your own needs
- A unique Good Medical Practice interval, specific to each rule, enables you to set the time after which the clinician is alerted for each type of event. This gives clinicians time to deliver appropriate medical care within the normal course of practice before they are notified. This patented feature was specifically designed to address the Achilles heel of most notification systems: over alerting, and subsequent ‘alert fatigue’.
- Ability to quickly build “sets” of clinical rules with filters that adjust for variations in rule parameters such as age, gender, weight, and unit, even down to the level of the individual physician.
- DPG assigns a low, medium or high priority to each alert that is issued based upon the criticality of the situation. This can be used for reporting purposes, as well as to determine the optimal method of notification (pager, email, PDA, etc.).
Guidelines are easily tailored by the clinician, risk manager or patient safety director to the specific best practices of the individual hospital.
- The appropriate labs can be recommended based on the medication order.
- Conversely, a specific lab result can trigger a recommendation of a specific medication order.
- Culture and Sensitivity Guidance: Immediate feedback from culture and sensitivity tests ensure that only the most effective antibiotics are administered to the patient, resulting in improved patient outcomes, lower drug costs and reduced length of stay.
- IV to PO: Based on clinical inputs from the patient record such as meals being ordered, coming off of TPN, or the administration of other oral medications, the optimal time to migrate the patient from IV to PO can be recommended.
- Clinical inputs, such as vital signs, EKG’s, invasive cardiac monitoring, etc. can result in specific recommendations. For example, post-operatively, a low body temperature might trigger a recommendation to the nursing staff to take the appropriate steps to raise body temperature (additional blankets, raise room temperature, etc.).
- An essential tool in Disease Management: Diagnosis Codes (ICD-9’s) can be activating events. For example, a rule might require that patients older than 60 years of age who are admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of community acquired pneumonia(CAP) be administered some form of antibiotics within a Good Medical Practice interval of eight hours and that a blood culture be taken before medication administration.
- Procedure Codes (CPTs) can be activating events. For example, a rule might require that all patients that have suffered a myocardial infarction, before being discharged from the hospital, be prescribed a beta blocker, if not contraindicated