Dispense Patterns Metric Overview

Dispense Patterns 

The Dispense Patterns metric dashboard is available at sites with nursing care area coverage. The dashboard highlights patterns in medication handling by individual nursing team members, and specifically those instances where medications are dispensed but no administrations are recorded. These patterns can indicate more variability in dispensing practice than the larger clinician cohort and may indicate a spike in activity meant to conceal other behavior patterns (e.g. creating a high volume of transaction entries without issues to make identifying discrepancies more difficult). ControlCheck users can use the application's display to narrow down areas of greater risk and focus investigative energies.

Access the Dashboard

Navigate to the Analytics tab in the main dashboard menu and select User Analytics in the dropdown menu. This will forward you to the IRIS Dashboard where you can then select the Dispense Patterns Metric link to view its dashboard. 

Filters

The Dispense Patterns metric dashboard allows for the following filters:

• Start Date - allows you to select a start date for your data
• End Date - allows you to select an end date for your data
• View by:
  • Include Accurate Return - counts the event summaries where the waste and/or return event(s) fully account for the volume dispensed by that user for that medication, with no administration data recorded. These event summaries are closed automatically by ControlCheck in the audit process because there is nothing incomplete in the documentation. 
  • Exclude Accurate Return - counts the event summaries where there is only a dispense transaction, no administration data recorded, and the waste and/or return event(s) do not fully account for the volume dispensed by that user for that medication. These event summaries are flagged for review by ControlCheck in the audit table.
• Standard Deviation
  • None; +1, +2, +3, +4 standard deviations from the norm

• Departments - the list of departments available for analysis reflects the data as first filtered by Drug 
• Drug - The list of drugs available for analysis reflects the data as first filtered by date, view, and/or standard deviation; the medications are grouped at the highest generic level

The default date range for all dashboards is the previous 30 days. Selecting a standard deviation filter will filter the results to show only data that is equal to or greater than the threshold selected.

Understand the Key

The overall count of medication events within the selected view and for the selected medication(s) is indicated by the length of the bar.

Interact with the Dashboard

Users should first select a date range and any additional desired filters to reflect the nature of the investigative question or to limit the scope.

Based on the applied parameters, the Units Dispensed With No Corresponding Administration bar display will update. By default, the results will be filtered to show only the top 30 nursing team members. The results are ranked by the total discrete count of event summaries for the medication(s) selected. The Y axis reflects the total number of medication events. Users can hover over any bar to view the summary statistics pop-up window.

Investigate the Data

To view the specific, detailed events included in a provider's results, first select the specific clinician for analysis. Once a clinician is selected, the pop-up window with the user's summary statistics will appear. Click Investigate Data in the user summary box to view all of the relevant medication events from that user; the results will load in a new browser tab.

A Note on the Data & Methods

A single event summary with activity from multiple nursing team members will appear once in each nurse's metrics.

Documentation errors are included in the event summary counts in this dashboard. Documentation errors are defined as automatically closed event summaries whose variance is not due to missing or incorrect medication amounts but instead due to a clinician's specific misstep in medication selection: the same medication, different concentrations. 

Some facilities may also have documentation errors related to the selection of outpatient versus inpatient identifiers. These are also included in the event summary counts in this dashboard. Open variances created within the preceding three days are excluded from the counts in this dashboard. Any event summaries connected to unmapped identifiers (medication, user), regardless of status or state, are excluded from the counts in this dashboard. Once mapping is completed and the related data is processed, the resulting event summaries will be included in any relevant metrics.