In the field of healthcare, where patient safety and operational efficiency take precedence, the adoption of TruMed’s AccuVax Vaccine Management System at Jane Pauley Community Health Center has proven to be a resounding success. This Customer Success Story highlights how integrating AccuVax and AccuShelf has streamlined the inventory management approach at Jane Pauley CHC, leading to reduced vaccine wastage, more efficient workflows, and enhanced patient safety.

From the moment its doors first opened in 2009, Jane Pauley Community Health Center (JPCHC) has been focused on making preventative health care more accessible in Indiana. Becoming a FQHC in 2011 certainly allowed the organization to stay true to that mission.

As an FQHC, JPCHC became eligible for much-needed public health funding from Medicare, enabling the center to not only better serve its existing patients but also expand the healthcare services provided. However, while operating as an FQHC helps many community healthcare facilities across the United States deliver quality care to underserved populations, it also presents unique challenges due to the program’s requirements.

Over the years, as the organization grew, managing the vaccine program while staying compliant with state and federal regulations became increasingly complex for vaccine coordinators at JPCHC. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the volume of vaccinations to surge to unmanageable numbers. This is when Jane Pauley Community Health Center turned to TruMed Systems’ vaccine management solutions.

Today, JPCHC operates 10 sites across four counties in Indiana, serving patients from a variety of communities, demographics, and backgrounds.

During the pandemic, maintaining the center’s FQHC status became more critical than ever. Each site needed to uphold detailed records in compliance with federal regulations, all while staff members:

• Fulfilled physician medication or vaccine orders
• Updated patients’ electronic medical records.
• Monitored inventory for temperature excursions.
• Tracked medication and vaccine waste.
• Conducted inventory audits to resolve discrepancies.

With the additional workload during the pandemic, the manual tasks involved in Jane Pauley CHC’s inventory management approach became more than each site could handle.

During that period, each site had vaccine coordinators responsible for managing inventory records and conducting audits independently. On-site staff had limited visibility into the extent of errors associated with vaccine storage and improper administration of doses.

Whenever issues arose with inventory records, vaccine coordinators had to manually redo physical inventory, often enlisting medical assistants to help complete these time-consuming tasks.

Auditing a single site could take six or more hours. Not only did that occupy staff time at each site, but there was still a likelihood of additional errors being introduced and an increased risk of excursions for temperature-sensitive vaccines and other medications.

Jane Pauley Community Health Center needed a scalable solution to simplify vaccine management and improve patient safety. The center began evaluating different systems, looking for an option that would allow staff at each site to best serve their patients and the local community as a whole.

Jane Pauley Community Health Center is dedicated to staying at the forefront of healthcare innovation, ensuring that the community it serves receives the highest standard of care. JPCHC’s leadership team recognized they needed an innovative solution that would empower the staff at each site to provide top-of-license care while increasing operational efficiency at each location.

When looking for an inventory management solution, Jane Pauley CHC wanted a solution that:

• Simplified records management and improved patient safety with easy loading, dispensing, and a user-friendly interface.
• Provided a single connected system for both Vaccine for Children (VFC) and private insurance doses without requiring separate data systems.
• Automated compliance reporting and ensured lot numbers were recorded consistently.

Incorporating AccuVax and AccuShelf has transformed how Jane Pauley Community Health Center approaches vaccine management. The team has already seen significant benefits – not only improving the quality and safety of patient care but also alleviating tedious, stressful, and often error-prone manual tasks that were overwhelming staff members.

With TruMed’s AccuVax vaccine management system, the JPCHC team found the combination of intuitive, intelligent automation, and simplified compliance that the center needed.

As often happens in clinical settings, on-site nurses and medical assistants were initially hesitant about integrating new technology into existing workflows. They soon, however, overcame this hesitation when they started dispensing from the AccuVax units.

According to the center’s quality vaccine supervisor, Lora McKeand, once they realized how using AccuVax alleviated their workload and simplified safety checks, on-site staff wanted every vaccine to be dispensed from this system.

Once they saw how well these systems worked for streamlining vaccine management, the JPCHC team purchased AccuShelf units for several of
their sites.

With a single, connected database across these two systems, McKeand has been able to significantly increase visibility into inventory data and solely manage six Jane Pauley CHC sites while also supporting three other sites.

McKeand quickly adapted to using the TruMed Systems AccuSite portal, which provided her with increased visibility and streamlined reporting while the vaccine storage technology reduced the risk of temperature excursions and vaccine waste.

When initially integrating AccuVax into their existing workflows, Jane Pauley CHC purchased five units to help simplify and accelerate vaccine dispensing during the pandemic. The AccuVax systems allowed them to shift vaccine inventory management from multiple on-site vaccine coordinators to one person working remotely.

This change not only standardized and accelerated records management across these sites but also gave vaccine coordinators more time to focus on supporting healthcare providers and their patients.

Additionally, AccuVax’s automated safety alerts have served as a training tool for new medical assistants, helping them to quickly learn safety guidelines for vaccine series. Currently, Jane Pauley CHC plans to have preceptors assigned to each site to train medical assistants and nurses in accessing the inventory data themselves via the portal.

And since TruMed Systems stays in contact to handle any troubleshooting or questions during this process, JPCHC administrators feel confident that they will soon be able to make AccuVax and AccuShelf training part of orientation for all
new hires.

In just a year of using AccuVax and AccuSehlf, Jane Pauley CHC sites have already experienced significant benefits and improvements.

Dispensing and administering vaccines incorrectly can pose significant risks to both patients and healthcare facilities. For instance, administering the Pentacel vaccine to a pediatric patient who has exceeded the age limit, such as accidentally giving it to someone over five years old, can have highly dangerous effects on the nervous system.

Similarly, if a patient returns too soon for their second HPV dose, administering it prematurely can be problematic. These errors not only necessitate incident reports and patient recalls but also jeopardize patient trust in the healthcare facility and providers.

AccuVax helps eliminate the potential to administer the wrong vaccine or wrong dose, and with Patient Safety Checks, AccuVax warns if the patient information conflicts with any of the following criteria: a vaccine’s indicated age, a vaccine’s minimum dose time interval, dose series count exceeds the maximum number and duplicate vaccines. Additionally, AccuVax securely isolates expired or recalled vaccines, ensuring that patients never receive an incorrect or compromised vaccine.

At Jane Pauley CHC, nurses and medical assistants quickly recognized the advantages of safety alerts, automated reporting, and security features. The dependability of these features boosted the staff’s confidence in dispensing vaccines and medications.

With AccuVax, vaccine management has become significantly easier for Jane Pauley CHC to manage – consolidating all records-keeping into a single web-based secure portal and standardizing inventory management and records across multiple sites.

Instead of handling records-keeping or inventory auditing manually, AccuVax automatically logs an accurate record each time a vaccine was dispensed, whether it was a VFC or private insurance dose. And the system was approved to use with VFC vaccines by the Indiana Department of Health.

As a result, JPCHC’s Quality Vaccine Supervisor could easily and confidently download reliable reports whenever needed.

This not only ensured compliance with reporting requirements for VFC vaccines but also freed up vaccine coordinators and medical assistants to catch up on other work and focus on delivering quality care.

Before using AccuVax, JPCHC staff had no way to determine when and how often temperature excursions occurred with their vaccine doses. 
For instance, during a power outage, nurses and medical assistants would often spend 2-3 hours calling the manufacturers for all the stored vaccines to determine if the affected vaccines needed to be discarded.

Now, staff members can simply check the portal and know exactly how long the AccuVax system has been on battery backup, saving hours per site and significantly reducing vaccine waste. Additionally, the JPCHC team can download reports to analyze the volume and rate at which different vaccines have been dispensed. This insight allows each site to more accurately predict what they need to order for the next month. Accurate ordering is crucial, especially when participating in the VFC program, as FQHCs must maintain a vaccine wastage rate under 5% to qualify for reimbursement.

What’s next for Jane Pauley and TruMed Systems?

Beyond the immediate benefits of AccuVax and AccuShelf, these systems serve as catalysts for launching innovative programs and boosting operational efficiency.

One such initiative is the development of an incident reporting program. With the insights provided by the AccuVax and AccuShelf inventory management systems, Jane Pauley CHC aims to assess the evolution of medical error rates over time. This data-driven approach will enable the center to customize training strategies, leading to continuous improvements in patient care.

With the additional time that nurses and medical assistants have to focus on long-term initiatives, Jane Pauley CHC is also exploring new ways to track progress, create documentation, and improve staff satisfaction overall.

In the future, JPCHC plans to incorporate additional AccuShelf units to manage medication samples and medical supplies to track usage to support the sites with lower vaccine dispensing requirements.

As Jane Pauley Community Health Center looks to the future with plans to expand these solutions, it’s clear they’re setting a new standard in healthcare efficiency and quality.