SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FDB (First Databank, Inc.), the leading provider of drug and medical device knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions, announced that Seattle Children’s Hospital has deployed the company’s Meducation® solution to ensure that pediatric patients and their family caregivers better understand how to take their medications. Meducation delivers medication instructions for individuals considered to be “high risk” due to low health literacy, poor vision or language barriers. Healthcare providers at Seattle Children’s can now access Meducation from within the workflow of their Cerner Millennium® electronic medical record system in both the inpatient and ambulatory environments.
Every year in the United States 63,000 children younger than age six, or one child every eight minutes, is affected by an out-of-hospital medication error on the part of their parents or caregivers, according to a 2014 study published in the journal Pediatrics. Meducation provides medication instructions for both patients and their family caregivers, with intuitive, simplified, multilingual medication instructions and calendars of their medication regimens. Meducation creates these instructions in any of 22 languages, with larger font sizes, pictograms and access to supplemental videos, to make it easy for patients and caregivers to understand how to take their medications.
Seattle Children’s provides patient-centered care to a diverse population with widely varying levels of health literacy and English proficiency and Meducation helps to overcome these communication challenges. Meducation has also been proven to help increase hospital patient satisfaction scores (HCAHPS), reduce readmission rates, and enhance financial performance by generating instructions that patients can easily understand and follow. Child HCAHPS pilots currently underway will help healthcare providers understand how best to address patient and caregiver experience and satisfaction and Meducation can have a direct impact on all of the measures currently being assessed.
“At Seattle Children’s we prescribe medications to prevent and treat a large number of conditions in children of all ages and with diverse backgrounds,” said Rod Tarrago, MD, Associate Chief Medical Information Officer and Medical Director of Medication Safety. “Assuring that our patients and families, regardless of their language or educational level, have both the knowledge and ability to administer those medications, is of utmost importance.”
Commented Troy McGuire, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer: “In conjunction with implementing improved processes for medication reconciliation and electronic prescribing, we rolled out Meducation as our standard, family-friendly discharge medication list. We chose Meducation because it is aligned with our core values: compassionate family-centered care, efficient workflow, clear communication, collaboration and innovation, and equitable education and treatment of the diverse population we serve.”
Meducation, a cloud-based solution, integrates with a variety of major information system vendors and the medication instructions are available within the clinical workflow. It has been licensed to hospitals, health systems, clinics and pharmacies across the United States.
About FDB
FDB is the leading provider of drug and medical device knowledge that helps healthcare professionals make precise decisions. With thousands of customers worldwide, FDB enables our information system developer partners to deliver valuable, useful, and differentiated solutions. We offer more than three decades of experience in transforming medical knowledge into actionable, targeted, and effective solutions that help improve patient safety, operational efficiency, and healthcare outcomes. For a complete look at our solutions and services, please visit www.fdbhealth.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Hearst Health
FDB is part of the Hearst Health network, which also includes Zynx Health, MCG, Homecare Homebase, MedHOK, Hearst Health International, Hearst Health Ventures and the Hearst Health Innovation Lab (www.hearsthealth.com). The mission of Hearst Health is to help guide the most important care moments by delivering vital information into the hands of everyone who touches a person's health journey. Each year in the U.S., care guidance from the Hearst Health network reaches 84 percent of discharged patients, 177 million insured individuals, 60 million home health visits, and 3.1 billion dispensed prescriptions.
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