Pyxis Connect

[VancTheTank]

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[StaviZFingerZ]

Why the hell would you want to spend $$$$$ on getting the Pyxis connect??????? Do you guys have money to burn???????

Look....pyxis connect is a glorified fax scanner that allows the order to be linked to the patient profile... yeah yea...

Does your hospital have a email server??? Then why not just set up a pharmacy email where nurses can fax-scan the orders to pharmacy???

You can get a couple of hundred dollar scanning software to do this..and additional monitor and a dual screen program.. few thousand bucks and you have your own home made order scan system.

BTW..once you go CPOE, you will never ever need this sort of order transmission.

Your DOP is an idiot.

 

[StaviZFingerZ]

OK...if you're the DOP and decided on the Pyxis Connect... I apologize for calling you an idiot.... tho I think anyone who decides to spend the money for these programs is an idiot..

 

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[WVUPharm2007]

I'm with Z...giant waste of cash. I wish my facility would go paperless (we still use fax machines)...but I've seen it in use at the hospital I used to work at...PC is ****ty software at a premium cost. And the director there was a HUGE idiot. He even leased one of those ridiculous ambulatory robots that always got lost in arbitrary places.

 

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[WVUPharm2007]

Send second ambulatory robot to retrieve. Problem solved.

I have never worked with such a droid, but I;ve always thought it would be damn funny to put a poorly scawled "KiCk mE" sign on the back of one.

One time it got confused and wound up in an elderly patient's room. It just sat there at the foot of his bed...rolling back and forth...repeatedly saying "Please remove the obstruction" over and over. Dude thought it was an alien or some ****. I'm going to have to get a video camera and have the pharmacist that was there that night tell the story and post it. It's hysterical. That thing got stuck or lost all the time. God help you if it forgets which floor it was on. Once we lost it and got a call from the OR that it was blocking one of the doors to one of the rooms and nobody could move it.

What do you do with all of your faxed orders? Scan them in the pharmacy or archive the hard copies?

We (meaning the techs) put them in little bins for each floor. Then at the end of the day they are all put into bigger folders and we keep them for a week. The original record is obviously in the chart on the floor.

 

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[kismet]

For those who have used it, what do you think? If you've been at your facility for it's implementation, what do you think has changed about your workflow model as a result?

Does your facility use nurse monitor, connect plus, or other means (print back) functions to transmit information back to nusing units?

Danke schoen

I have no experience with anything else but it's definitely got its flaws. A friend of mine left the hospital to go work for Pyxis.. he tells me now the "print back" function was not actually an intended use of Connect but the field techs figured it out and bastardized the system anyway. Once in a while the workstations randomly lose one or more scan stations to print back to, no rhyme or reason, but it's been damn impossible for me to install one of those things myself and it's a pain in the rear to make my field tech come out solely to install a few printers.

We "print back" orders mostly for clarification; also we print back approvals to the ED on pediatric orders because policy came down sometime last year that the ED can't send peds home until a pharmacist has approved the discharge meds (some sentinel event in the region triggered this policy, it's been fun). Printing back tends to be rather useless though; unless the ward clerk working at the desk distributes this note back, the nurses never see it. Usually they scan us the same incomplete order five times until we call them or they call us. Also, my favorite call has become, "I just scanned you an order for x, can you enter it now?"

What I do like is that if a nurse calls and asks "where are my drugs?", techs or pharmacists can pull up the patient's orders and any notes the pharmacists made. So often, as a tech, I can answer, "that drug is non-formulary, pharmacist suggested drug xyz or patient's own instead" or whatever, and save the pharmacist the time of taking the call and interrupting what they're working on now. However, I doubt this function is unique to Connect.

I disagree that it's a way for pharmacists to shirk their duties; our nurse to patient ratio on the floor is 6:1 (which they tell me is low; my first hospital job so may or may not be propaganda) and it's next to impossible to get a nurse on the phone. So even if they don't get the notes but a tech can relay the clarification when the nurse calls, I think it's helpful. Absolutely anything complicated you should pick up the phone or take a walk upstairs, but I think it's useful for the "everyday routine" clarifications or missing allergies.

Scanned orders: originals are in the patient's chart, electronic copies are archived.

Scan stations tend to go down every once in a while/pretty regularly for any or no reason; I've got all my techs trained to properly reboot them but it can be a pain. I know it's a computer and things happen, but I don't really have to regularly reboot pretty much every other piece of technology we're running.

We're still running Medstation 2000's so I have no clue if any improvements have been made to the Connect program recently. FWIW, my buddy who works for Pyxis tells me that Omnicell's workflow-program or whatever you'd call it is light years better.

 

[solzont]

...It has also mutated into a system for rph's to send "notes" back to the floors. This can be anything from "please add allergies to HIS" to "drug x is non-formulary, contact MD for alternative agent". This **** pisses me off and I view it as a total dodge on the part of my coworkers who use it. I feel like if you have a question about an order, you need to speak with a human who can address your concern, not fax an anonymous love note to the floor nurse.

Here, here! We have the same problem with that note passing bull****. I second your motion.

 

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[njac]

One of the hospitals in our system has the replacement dose requests form our HIS "print" to a technician Connect queue. I don't know a great deal about their process but it is kind of an interesting idea.

we do this - we schedule a "missing dose" tech to triage phone calls and preview all scans, and send missing doses or troubleshoot (is it in the fridge, in the tube, etc).

we also do technician/intern order entry when necessary, and you just put in the comments "PLS CHECK"