We recently hosted a free webinar on medication administration and have been promoting our barcode scanning feature for the last few weeks. Why? Because medication administration is a big deal in the world of EHR meaningful use measures. For stage two of meaningful use requirements, medical practices must "enable a user to create a single reconciled list of medications, medication allergies, or problems" among other medication related requirements.
That means that medical practices are electronically recording all medication records including when meds are passed to a patient or allergies to medications are identified. Our nursing students will be hard pressed to find a medical office that doesn't require them to electronically record that information in the future.
We take that as a challenge. We've taken it upon ourselves to make it as easy as possible for instructors to incorporate the same technology used by medical practices into their classroom. That means barcode scanning for patients and medications, the ability to track telephone and written orders and an up-to-date MAR for every patient.
So we'd love to hear from all of you instructors out there - how are you preparing your students for tracking medications?