Med Trends Metric Overview

Med Trends

The Med Trends metric dashboard highlights trends in medication usage and handling across individual nursing team members. The dashboard allows the user to trace a clinician's dispense, administration, waste, and return patterns across a medication, and compare rates within the larger cohort or within a specific department to identify outliers. 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 Med Trends Metric link to view its dashboard. 

Filters

The Med Trends 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
• 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
• Standard Deviation
  • None; +1, +2, +3, +4 standard deviations from the norm

• Measure - Total Units, Total Events
• Department
• Event Type - Dispense, Administration, Waste, Return

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 height of the clinician's bar reflects the calculated average of the selected medication, for the specific transaction type, within the dataset produced by any applied filters. The measurement will be calculated in the preferred units for that medication based on the implementing hospital's formulary.

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. The dashboard will display N/A in any tiles for which there are no results based on the applied filters. Adjust filter settings to populate data.

Based on the applied parameters, the bar displays will update. By default, the results will be filtered to show only the top 25 nursing team members. The results are ranked left to right by the highest average of the selected transaction type and medication. If a specific user is highlighted in one transaction type, and they are present in the top 25 results for any other transaction types, a pink dot will indicate their relative position on that metric in the thumbnail views on the right of the main graph.

Investigate the Data

To view the specific, detailed events included in a clinician's results for a medication and transaction type, 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

Documentation errors are excluded 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. A common example of this type of auto-closed documentation error is shown below:

Some facilities may also have documentation errors related to the selection of outpatient versus inpatient identifiers. These are also excluded 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.