Case Study: Winona Health achieves 5.5% drug cost reduction with Cerner ITWorks

Winona Health’s automated medication charge process benefits pharmacy, reduces costs

Winona Health, an independent rural health care system in southeast Minnesota, faced inconsistent medication pricing across multiple chargemasters that created a mismatch between patient charges and actual drug costs. Clinicians, pharmacists and billers lacked transparency into total cost of care, leading to manual work, missed or miscoded charges and difficulty controlling inventory and expenses.

Working with Cerner ITWorks, Winona implemented PharmNet and integrated it with Cerner Patient Accounting to automate medication charging and improve documentation and workflows. The change reduced total drug costs by $226,000 (a 5.5% decrease from July 2016 to July 2017), cut claims scrubber errors for missing NDCs by 83% (287 → 48), improved billing transparency, freed pharmacists for patient care by enabling single orders for treatment duration, and gave the organization capacity to extend improvements to supply chain and barcode scanning.

Winona Health

Robin Hoeg

Vice President, Inpatient and Senior Services