Friday, April 09, 2010 11:51:14 AM
Barnes-Jewish Anticoagulation Clinic Receives Top Notch Rating Thanks to Standing Stone's CoagClinic
Published in the Suburban Journals of St. Louis and the surrounding Missouri and Illinois communities.
Barnes-Jewish St. Peters anticoagulation clinic receives top-notch ranking
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 1:15 AM CST
The outpatient anticoagulation clinic of Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital recently was ranked in the 100th percentile nationwide for ensuring its patients' blood test results are within the appropriate International Normalized Ratio (INR) range according to The Standing Stone Chronicles data for 2009.
The high marks were tabulated using the results of more than 2.8 million INRs from October 2008 through October 2009 using an anticoagulation software program and database, CoagClinc, of Standing Stone. The data sample contained information submitted by 394 hospitals and anticoagulation clinics nationwide.
The Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital outpatient anticoagulation clinic submits more than 8,000 INRs annually to CoagClinic for recording and analyzing. The hospital's INR information contains the lab results of patients using blood-thinning medications, or anticoagulants, to help prevent blood clots.
Susan Dreckshage, RN, BSN, is a cardiopulmonary charge nurse at Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital.
"We submit our data as a means to provide monitoring and adjusting our patients' warfarin/Coumadin medication. The information we submit along with other clinics is compiled, compared and eventually provides benchmarks. These benchmarks set the gold standard care, not just for Barnes-Jewish St. Peters Hospital, but for everyone," she said.
Dreckshage has been instrumental in helping her team keep informed of the newest oral anticoagulants and the most up-to-date test guidelines for anticoagulation treatments.
She has completed coursework for the Anticoagulation Therapy Management Certification Program offered through the University of South Indiana. In addition, she has attended the biannual Anticoagulation Forum National Conference since 2002.
"The results show we are keeping patients' therapeutic levels more consistent than 90 percent of the anticoagulation clinics nationwide," Dreckshage said. "I believe our success is partially because of the fact we are staffed with all registered nurses with extensive experience in intensive care or telemetry. But it is also our close monitoring of the data and our ability to make immediate adjustments that produces the best outcomes for our patients."
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