Today’s COVID count includes 7 active patients.
Key points from today’s guests:
Leigh Anne Scott, Senior Director, Pharmacy Operations and Services, The University of Kansas Health System
- White bagging is a term linked to medication deliveries in boxes. It is used to describe when a payer mandated pharmacy is selected for you to deliver infusion or IV medication to a hospital or clinic.
- The medication is often time sensitive or temperature sensitive, and can be sitting on a loading dock where temperatures can soar, or on a doctor's desk.
- In either situation, extreme temperatures can make the medication ineffective or spoiled.
- We've had patients be pretty frustrated about how hard it is to get a simple medication. And just as important to us are the safety checks and workflows that we've put into place to take care of patients and prepare medications. So when we receive those medications in an unusual way, then that takes us off of our normal process.
- Our patients and their care is always our primary concern.
- Some of the challenges and risks that are created by white bagging make it harder to provide day to day care.
Karen Braman, Senior Vice President, Clinical and Strategic Initiatives, Kansas Hospital Association
- A few months ago, the Kansas Hospital Association and our partners with the Kansas Council on Health System Pharmacy surveyed hospitals across the state to ask about the impact that light bagging has had on their patients and their facilities.
- The vast majority of hospitals that responded to our survey indicated that there was a negative impact to their patients care because of white bagging either in timeliness or appropriateness or safety of the care.
- Another important lesson that we learned when we surveyed hospitals across the state was that there's a lot of waste that has been introduced into the healthcare system because of this insurance company practice.
- We asked hospitals if they had any problems with white bagged medications and almost half of hospitals indicated that they had to throw medications away that had been white bagged because they couldn't guarantee that those medications were safe.
- We really want people to know that this practice of white bagging is an insurance company mandated process that really has introduced unnecessary risk into patient care and could delay treatment and also introduce real safety concerns too.
- We support real common sense protections to be put in place to make sure that a patient's medication is safe from the time they leave the pharmacy until the time that it's administered at their clinic or their hospital.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, medical director, infection prevention & control, The University of Kansas Health System
- A new study says it does matter which arm you get a vaccine injected into.
- We try to say get it in your most dominant arm because you're going to be using that are more that will help work out some of the tightness and discomfort and also get that solution through your cells through your blood system.
- It's really unclear if it means that you are going to have better protection against possible infection but also severe disease. So it is not clear that there are benefits with that.
- This study was also done very early on when the COVID vaccines were available.
Monday, Aug. 28 at 8 a.m. CT is the next Morning Medical Update. We’ll get an update from Dr. Douglas Burton, a spinal surgeon at the Health System who also happens to have glioblastoma -- an aggressive brain cancer. Learn more about his journey and push for awareness of one day finding a cure for this devastating diagnosis.
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