McKesson Announces Patient Care Advantage, Takes Patient Safety, Evidence-Based Practice and Care Team Support to the Next Level

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Building on strong market acceptance and momentum with its Horizon Clinicals^® suite, McKesson will introduce Patient Care Advantage™ at the HIMSS^®08 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Orlando Feb. 24-28. The debut of Patient Care Advantage marks a major expansion of McKesson’s widely adopted care delivery platform. It establishes Horizon Clinicals as the first integrated solution to unify medical and interdisciplinary care plans, driving evidence-based practice across all members of the care team. The solution incorporates the new Care Team release with more than 8,000 new features and advanced clinical workflow support enabled by a new and expanded Horizon Architecture™. Patient Care Advantage reflects extensive customer collaboration and the user experiences of more than two million clinicians who rely on Horizon Clinicals every day.

Horizon Clinicals is the cornerstone of McKesson’s Patient Care Advantage solution, which drives a “one patient, one care team, one plan” approach to care delivery, enabling hospitals to provide safer, more efficient care. Patient Care Advantage delivers sophisticated decision support to help clinicians manage complexity and achieve measurably better outcomes for patients – including advanced tools to support the medication reconciliation process. It combines these advantages with powerful solutions for workforce management, capacity planning, and McKesson’s “bedside back” integration of software with pharmacy and bedside automation to help caregivers eliminate errors across the entire medication use process.

“With the care environment growing exponentially more complex, clinicians need constant visibility into the patient’s progress and care that the other members of the team are providing, and they need workflow support that is much more proactive – helping to anticipate key milestones in the patient’s plan,” said Duncan James, group president, Health Systems, McKesson Provider Technologies. “Patient Care Advantage supports this care team focus with the delivery of a complete patient history that reflects care provided across all settings, leading to a more comprehensive view of the patient’s condition and the most effective evidence-based treatment plans.”

The solution boasts the most robust medication safety capabilities, including the first fully electronic medication reconciliation solution that is accompanied by a comprehensive set of medication safety analytics. Patient Care Advantage also includes new advanced dosing capabilities developed by McKesson and Duke University Health System. Advanced dosing is designed to increase the accuracy and safety of medication prescribing for complex, high-risk patients by providing patient-specific recommendations coupled with sophisticated dose calculators and rounding algorithms tightly tailored to the indication for the medication.

Another innovation for improving safety is the addition of three new perinatal care risk reduction modules that provide a proactive, preventive approach to identifying obstetrics patients at risk. McKesson’s perinatal care solutions are the first in the industry to support continuity of care between the labor and delivery (L&D) department and other hospital departments and units.

Patient Care Advantage also embeds online InterQual^® criteria for decision support, McKesson’s gold-standard solution for medical appropriateness used by more than half of the nation’s hospitals. InterQual’s patient-specific criteria help caregivers and case managers determine whether patients are meeting the key milestones that impact timely discharge, enabling them to adjust the care plan to reach the best outcome for the patient.

“All too often the best available evidence is peripheral to clinicians’ workflow, which leads to variation in practice, resulting in quality and safety issues,” said Billie Whitehurst, M.S., R.N., chief nursing officer of McKesson Provider Technologies. “With the new Care Team release, our goal is to make evidence actionable at the bedside, while building in highly specialized support needed to guide safe, high-quality care decisions in specific clinical situations.”

Broadscale adoption for better, safer care

Horizon Clinicals solutions span virtually all settings of care and are relied upon by more than 2 million clinicians initiating more than 50 million clinical transactions each week. McKesson has been at the forefront of major breakthroughs in patient safety and was first to introduce a point-of-care, bar-code medication administration solution. Today McKesson’s bar-code medication administration solution helps caregivers prevent more than 700,000 medication errors weekly. Recent industry studies have underscored the company’s leadership in device connectivity – showing that more customers use McKesson clinical solutions to connect with their patient monitoring devices than any other clinical IT company.

Patient Care Advantage builds on the broad acceptance and adoption of Horizon Clinicals with powerful solutions for medication safety, capacity/patient flow and workforce management. It is a component of Horizon Advantage, a family of solutions that together solve the biggest issues facing healthcare by uniting the patient, clinicians, pharmacy, payor and employer. McKesson understands the interdependencies among these constituents and delivers solutions that enable health systems to improve patient care quality, operational excellence and financial performance.

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and healthcare 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. McKesson is the longest-operating company in healthcare today, marking its 175^th anniversary this year. Over the course of its 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, visit http://www.mckesson.com.