Globe Report 2009 - 11

awards
Shaping the Future for Seniors
e had no idea she was taking so many medications!” The woman on the phone sounded overwhelmed. “Oh, that’s not unusual,” explained the pharmacist on the other end of the line. “Seniors take an average of eight medications to manage various medical conditions.” “But my aunt doesn’t seem to know which ones she is supposed to take or when to take them or even how many to take! How are we going to figure this out?” The pharmacist, a health care provider with Novant Health’s Safe Med program in North Carolina, patiently answered all of the niece’s questions and offered solutions. By the end of the call, a plan was in place: The niece would visit her elderly aunt every two days and stock a pill box, provided at no cost by the Safe Med program, with a 48hour supply of her medications. “This niece had no understanding of her aunt’s medications,” says Terri Cardwell, Pharm.D., Safe Med clinical pharmacist for Novant Health. “She’d never been to a doctor’s appointment with her nor had any of her aunt’s medications been explained to her. She and her husband Terri Cardwell just checked on her whenever they could, thinking that her aunt was able to handle things better than she really could. But after we talked to them, they realized that she needed to be checked on more often and needed some safe guards in place. Otherwise, this elderly woman is very typical of the type of patient who would have to be readmitted to the hospital because of a medication error.” And that’s the whole point of the Safe Med program, which was awarded the ASHP Foundation’s Award for Excellence in Medication-Use Safety in 2008. Novant, a not-

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for-profit, integrated health care system based in North Carolina, whose practices had about 4 million visits in 2009, serves people in 34 counties reaching from southern Virginia to northern South Carolina. Patients who are 65 years or older are 7 times more likely to require hospitalization due to an adverse drug event (ADE). Novant’s Safe Med pharmacists try to reduce this statistic by contacting the health system’s patients in this age group who have chronic diseases within 7 days of their discharge, assessing the patient’s medication regimen and providing adherence and safety education. A reconciled list of medications is also provided to the patient and primary care provider after each encounter. To date, the Safe Med program has offered consultations to 6,839 patients and made 9,272 total calls to patients. Through research, they’ve discovered that only 11.5% of Safe Med patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, compared to 14.2% of patients who are not in the Safe Med program. There was an overall 19% readmission reduction among the patients contacted by Safe Med. “The people we contact are the sickest of the sick, so they are more likely to be readmitted, but we are still showing a notable decrease over other patient groups,” says Cardwell. The latest Safe Med data also shows that the age of people using the service is getting younger. In 2008, the average age of a Safe Med patient was 78; it is now 73, and Safe Med has also helped 125 patients younger than 65. Cardwell believes this is because more of Novant’s physicians became aware of the Safe Med program after receiving the award and are referring more of their patients. “We primarily call those patients age 65 or older who are discharged from one of our hospitals,” says Cardwell. “But we’re getting more and more referrals from physicians who have seen that this service is very helpful to the patients as well as the

annual report 2009

awards

Globe Report 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Globe Report 2009