end of month changeover-

[lpn1313]

After having just finished possibly the longest chaneover thus far for me, I have a questions. Anybody use an in house computer based MAR? Our pharmacy offers emars, but also uses the scanner system with them, but the higher ups will never authorize that kind of spending. (budget, must watch the budget) Anybody have a system that works well? Right now the pharmacy prints off MARs and TARs for us, but I end up changing a lot. Anyone manage their own MARs? Any tips or suggestions will help. :thnkg:

BTW- pharmacy only prints for the whole house once, I can't get them to send my floor later, but chanangeover has to be done as close to the last day of the month due to the volume of orders that change. I work the short stay rehab floor at a LTC.

[txredheadnurse, BSN, RN]

I do my own MARS on my work computer. I use a word document template that I devised a few years back. Now depending on the number of patients it might be too time consuming to use my method. The way I avoid the insanity of trying to update everything at the end of the month is to update the template stored on my flash drive as I take off the orders. That normally means all I have to do at the end of the month are any med changes that have occurred within the last few days, change the month and double check that meds, times, etc. are still correct.

My experience with pharmacy generated MARS & TARS is that they receive so many changes for so many people that things are not updated, discontinued or added which means spending most of a day just proofing the dang things and handwriting in the correct info. I have even had 1 pharmacy that did a separate page for each new med ordered in the month. For 1 patient I received 12 MARs each with 1 med only on them . Talk about a med error waiting to happen.

[NurseExec]

We do our MARS/TARS and POSs in house using American Healthtech's LTC program. It works well, but sometimes changeover can still be a cluster. I'm working on using some suggestions I got here to streamline things. It was actually the best this month that it's ever been. You might want to check out that thread--it's in the DON/ADON forum.