Brigham and Women's Hospital goes mobile

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a 720-bed facility with more than 6,000 admissions per year, ambitiously created its eMAR (Electronic Medication Administration Record) system, a wide-reaching, entirely mobile application. The initiative is credited with yielding a more efficient, reliable method for positively identifying both the health care worker and patient, while ensuring that the dispensation of drugs is rigorously checked against the patient’s profile.

The result is a fully closed medical management loop, hospital officials say.

“It’s all right there at the point of care,” says Cindy Spurr, corporate director for clinical systems management.

The eMAR system was built several years ago and relied on a Caché post-relational database by InterSystems software vendors and some outside help. However, development and roll-out of mobile eMAR was handled in-house by a multidisciplinary group including IT, nursing and pharmacy staff, and internal auditors. The confluence of several technology advancements such as Bluetooth and bar coding made it all feasible. Nurses use Bluetooth-enabled mobile bar-code readers that link up to PCs on mobile carts.

Two-dimensional data matrix bar-codes can carry significant information payload. Every medication is repackaged and bar-coded for consistency. Patients are identified with a bar code on the wristband through the patient registration system, and every clinician must wear bar-coded ID badges.