Summer 2021 – Transforming Pharmacy Through Innovation and Superior Customer Experience

Ken Osborn
Senior Director, Product Marketing, Omnicell

As medication management continues to be one of the top challenges of healthcare today, Omnicell’s commitment to delivering the innovation to navigate and streamline the complexities of the pharmacy care delivery model is stronger than ever. Today, we announced our Summer 2021 Release, which delivers enhancements across our entire portfolio designed to improve efficiency, expand automation, and enhance intelligence, supported through a superior customer experience, driving maximum value sooner for your technology investment.

Improved Efficiency

The U.S. healthcare system employs over 4.2 million healthcare practitioner, technical, and support personnel, with double-digit growth and shortages forecast in nearly all positions. Latest enhancements in the Summer Release are designed to improve medication management workflows and patient safety, allowing clinicians to provide greater patient care and reduce job-related stress and burnout.

For example, expanded capabilities in the operating room are simplifying anesthesiologist workflows, while improving inventory visibility and access to data insights. And new closed-loop interoperability between XT Anesthesia Workstation™ and the electronic health record, beginning with Epic, supports an intuitive reconciliation processes that facilitate greater waste compliance. In the central pharmacy, our IVX Workflow management system, now supports decentralized compounding, enabling an sterile compounding workflow system now supports decentralized compounding, enabling an alternative way to compound new orders. This and other enhancements will help accelerate implementations and increase then number of compounded sterile preparations produced through IVX Workflow.

Expanded Automation

With more than 148 million doses of medicine lost in 2019, controlled substance management remains a significant challenge in the U.S. healthcare system, compromising both patient and workforce safety. New enhancements to Omnicell’s Controlled Substance Dispenser (CSD) delivered in the Summer 2021 Release are designed to provide customers more flexibility with their medication supply chain and enhance controlled substance management initiatives. 

Through a new partnership with Fresenius Kabi, a new Controlled Substance Dispenser cassette will be designed specifically for Simplist® MicroVault® 1 and 2 mL prefilled syringes, enabling single dose dispensing of these widely used syringes. The Controlled Substance Dispenser helps to better manage inventory, reduce the chance of diversion, and save nursing time.

Enhanced Intelligence

Drug shortages are estimated to cost facilities at least $359 million per year in additional spend on labor alone. It’s just one of the many reasons why complete visibility and optimization of the pharmacy supply chain is imperative. With the Summer 2021 Release, Omnicell One™, a technology-enabled service delivered through the cloud, has expanded inventory optimization through new enhancements designed to streamline operations. These include easy-to-read dashboards that show the medications and locations that are frequently stocked out or at risk of stock out to help prevent future shortages; industry-sourced COVID-19 Lists to help better manage and track critical medications used in the treatment of COVID-19; and Cabinet Benchmarking, including safety standards identified by ISMP and other Omnicell practices standards, that eliminate the need to manually select certain cabinet configuration settings.

Platform Flexibility

With the Summer 2021 Release, health system leaders now have the option to elevate their pharmacy operations with greater scalability through Cloud-Hosted OmniCenter®. This new platform flexibility will allow health system pharmacies to securely access data, reduce IT burden, forecast predictable monthly costs, deliver a seamless user experience, and provide better space optimization.

As we continue to work with leading health systems to support digital pharmacy transformations, we recognize the importance of strong partnerships to ensure organizational readiness, drive solution adoption, and support ongoing customer success. We are keenly focused on providing the expertise and guidance to help health systems navigate the process through a superior customer experience – from strategy to execution to ongoing success.

The Summer 2021 Release is the next step in supporting the journey to the fully autonomous pharmacy. Learn more about these latest innovations here.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author(s). These views are always subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time and may not be held in perpetuity.