Case Study: Lafayette General Health achieves medication reconciliation excellence and safer care with DrFirst MedHx

Lafayette General Health Improves Patient Safety with System-wide Med Rec Improvements

Lafayette General Health (LGH), a regional health system in Lafayette, LA with seven owned hospitals, 793 beds and 4,000+ staff using Cerner, faced significant medication reconciliation challenges. Clinically they dealt with lengthy patient interviews and frequent phone calls to families, pharmacies and providers; organizationally they saw inconsistent accountability, weak compliance auditing, underused technology, staff competency gaps and outdated workflows.

Beginning in January 2016 LGH implemented DrFirst’s MedHx and SmartSig integrated into their Cerner EHR, expanded med rec across all transitions of care, and partnered on workflow assessments, training and compliance auditing. The solution delivered clean, consumable medication data that reduced manual entry and transcription errors—producing an initial 18% improvement in medication history quality and, over nine weeks, a 28% decrease in manual entries and a 26% increase in imported medication histories—resulting in time savings, reduced risk and better regulatory compliance.

Lafayette General Health

Melinda Arnaud

RPh Informatics Pharmacist