UMHS Patient Triage

Hello readers!

I am writing this last summer post about my experience as the pharmacy employee responsible for patient triage at the University of Michigan hospital. To start, working patient triage entails serving in one of the hospital’s inpatient unit pharmacies. The position involves completing nurse requests that originate from the pharmacy window, answering incoming phone calls into the pharmacy, responding to requests made through the University of Michigan’s medical record software called CareLink, and disseminating patient medication orders to other staff working in the unit pharmacy. These aforementioned responsibilities require good communication, team building, and leadership skills. First, fulfilling requests involves beginning, continuing, or refilling a medication in a patient’s CareLink drug regiment. This means printing out patient drug labels for compounding technicians to fill and pharmacists to check. Second, phone calls are directed to the appropriate hospital department, transferred to an available pharmacist, or are answered and provided with accurate clinical knowledge within the scope of a pharmacy technician’s role. Third, hospital staff requests through CareLink are completed in much of the same manner as phone calls are handled. Fourth, dissemination of information among unit pharmacy staff is based upon the fact that drugs are to be administered at different time periods. Since the unit pharmacy staff want to provide patients and hospital staff with medications that are new and have long hang-by and expiration timing, the technicians will usually wait until an hour before the medication is due to start compounding it or will wait for a nurse phone call to confirm if the drug is still actually needed if the medication is expensive. It is up to the employee working patient triage to accurately relay this kind of information. As always, patient triage also requires workers to pneumatically tube finished medications directly to the patient’s unit location if they are required STAT (Sooner Than Already There)!

To conclude, I want to say it has been very fun this summer. I hope that my blogs have provided you with insight on how the University of Michigan unit pharmacies inner-workings operate and the processes involved in the central pharmacy department. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I wish the rest of your summer is enjoyable and that you have success in all of your future pharmacy endeavors!

-Adam Loyson