Does your MAR show pain, glucose, VS relevant to med you are giving?

Nurses General Nursing

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I've used EMRs in the past where it showed the latest blood glucose (and when) in the med screen where you are documenting giving insulin. If you're giving pain meds, it allows for you to document the pain on that dialog box. Same with BP and HR for cardiac meds.

One we're using now, Allscripts, doesn't show any of that. You can't even access the information without closing out of the med window. This seems slow and ineffective at best and dangerous at worst! Surely there's a way to modify the templates to pull that info into that screen.

Don't all EMRs show such relevant patient info for each medication or at least have a quick way to access it?

Ours has a place for it to be entered and we are also able to double click on it to pull up the last charted value (instead of manually entering it). Honestly, I feel like it "dumbs things down" a bit and I dislike having to complete the extra steps. I would rather note all my patient's vital signs at one time and act accordingly.

We still have to document a pain assessment every time we give pain meds, which can be q1-2 for some of our patients, but you can't do it from the MAR. We have to give the pain medication, close that window, open another window, pull up the vital signs then find the pain section and enter it there. You can guess that it sometimes gets forgotten. It would be so much easier if it was right there on the med screen in one dialog box rather than in an entirely different window. You can't just Alt+Tab to see it. You actually have to close the med screen and open the assessment screen. It's ridiculously inefficient.

Specializes in Med Surg.

I make sure I know that info before I even pull the meds.

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