Interventions: a quality assessment tool for the pharmacy department and the medical staff

The intervention tracking system at Texas Children's Hospital has evolved from a simple log to a pocket book of check-off forms requiring minimal writing. Information gathered from the intervention data has progressed from merely notification that a call was made to tracking numbers and types of interventions to including the pharmacists in the information loop. Pharmacists are assured that the time spent documenting interventions provides data for medical staff QI, pharmacy QI, and feedback to themselves as well. No documentation is wasted; no separate data collection is required. Intervention categories with medical staff-approved indicators are treated as a concurrent DUE. Depending on the rate of acceptance of pharmacists' recommendations, physicians, pharmacists, or both are targeted for education. Analysis of the acceptance rate may also indicate the need for systems changes more profoundly affecting one or the other of the groups.