Nursing Portal from McKesson Addresses Complex Demands on Caregivers

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Expanding on its continuum of solutions to support nursing workflow and patient-centered care, McKesson will introduce the Horizon^WP Nursing Portal at the HIMSS^®07 Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans February 25-March 1. The new solution leverages the company’s experience deploying the industry’s most widely adopted portal, Horizon^WP Physician Portal, which gives users secure, anytime, anywhere access to patient data via the Internet.

“Clinicians log on to Horizon^WP Physician Portal more than 3.7 million times per month, and an estimated 600,000 of those logins are nurses,” said Billie Waldo, MS, RN, BC, solution line manager, acute care solutions. “The nursing portal personalizes their experience, while preserving a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and physician communication. It also helps customers leverage their investment in the Horizon^WP Foundation enterprise portal infrastructure while exponentially increasing value for their largest and most visible clinical workforce.”

The new portal serves as a “command center,” giving nurses access to the information most relevant to them including clinical and medication histories, flowsheets, images and results as well as charting, medication administration, order management – even fetal strip monitoring and nursing-specific census management. Nurses can better manage the complexity of patient care with review tools such as on-the-fly graphing to quickly identify trends, a variety of options for customizing flowsheets, and critical alerts that help prioritize patient needs. A single sign-on provides personalized access from any device.

“High configurability and rapid access to information are keys to widespread adoption for any group of users, but nursing presents some of the greatest challenges,” said Waldo. “According to ongoing research by Ascension Health and Kaiser Permanente, the typical medical-surgical nurse walks six miles per shift and spends only 10 seconds in one spot. The challenge for health IT vendors is to design solutions that create more efficient workflows for nurses, helping them achieve higher levels of quality and safety and ultimately giving them more time with patients.”

The new portal improves patient safety in several ways. For example, it provides a longitudinal view of encounter data, including medication histories and clinical summaries, from multiple settings such as the emergency or surgery departments. It also helps providers address key National Patient Safety Goals from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, with a special module for medication reconciliation and customized tools for improving handoff communications such as an electronic Situation/Background/Assessment/Recommendation (SBAR) form.

History of nursing workflow innovation

McKesson invented the first bar-code point-of-care (BPOC) medication administration device in 1989. Today, Horizon Admin-Rx™ is the nation’s leading BPOC solution, with more than 125 implementations and more than 330,000 medication errors prevented each week. It is also the cornerstone of Horizon MobileCare Nursing™, an integrated suite of applications that ensures positive patient identification when collecting specimens, vital signs and I&Os, and that directs nurses to the proper location of medications at AcuDose-Rx^™ cabinets. In 2005 McKesson introduced CarePoint-RN^™, a secure, mobile medication cart and clinical workstation that has been shown to give back 2½ hours per nurse per shift.

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 16th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. Over the course of its 174-year history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare, and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information: www.mckesson.com.