Aspirus St. Luke's First Hospital in Minnesota to Implement Kit Check
St. Luke’s Hospital announced it has implemented Kit Check to track medications and automate the restocking of pharmacy kits used throughout the hospital for critical care procedures. The solution that combines cloud software and radio-frequency identification tags added to each medication will also enable more efficient processes for anesthesia medication replenishment in the operating room and managing drug recalls. St. Luke’s is the first hospital in Minnesota to implement the Kit Check solution.
“We utilize many different types of kits in the pharmacy as a way to have specific medications on hand for the provider just in case they need to administer them in an emergency,” said Brent Williams, St. Luke’s pharmacy manager. “It is a very time-consuming process to keep track of the medications in these kits and keep them stocked appropriately for the provider. Kit Check allows us to more efficiently accomplish this task. We are able to utilize RFID tags with a scanning station to very quickly determine which medications were used during a case and which medication in the tray will expire first. We are also able to tell at any given moment which kits that are deployed on our nursing units contain medications that have been recalled by the manufacturer or are nearing expiration.”
St. Luke’s pharmacy previously restocked all kits manually. Since only a few items are used from each kit during a procedure, pharmacy staff had to pick up each remaining medication to determine what was used and should be restocked. They also had to manually check those remaining items to ensure no medications needed to be removed due to expiration. The Kit Check software now calculates that data automatically. An INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy Journal article in June reported an average time savings of 80.4% among three hospitals studies using Kit Check.
Williams also noted, “Using Kit Check will allow us to implement a new tray exchange system for the medications that are used by anesthesia. Each day, anesthesia providers will pick up a new tray of medications from the pharmacy. The tray will contain the various medications needed for surgeries for the day. The speed of Kit Check is enabling us to implement the new process. This will help reduce expenditures on medications that may otherwise be stockpiled in a room.”