Las Vegas City Wire

A graduate student in nursing at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, implemented a better way to dispense medicine at VA Hospital of Southern Nevada.

According to a press release from the university, Barrister Perez, who is also a health care practitioner and a veteran, saw that there was a loophole in properly delivering medication with Vista CPRS, a system used by nurses to dispense medication to patients.

“It often gets missed because in bedside nursing, everything gets busy after a while, and they forget,” Perez said in the release. “The nurses weren't checking on them, whether the medication worked or not, because of the lack of a reminder.”

Barrister Perez | UNLV

When Perez noticed that compliance metrics were falling, he began researching whether an alert from an automated system could correct the problem.

“I called Seattle and Long Beach to acquire the data, and it showed an S-curve adaptation," he said. "By the time they adapted the feature, their metrics just shot up. It's sustained from when they started adopting it in late 2018 to early 2019.”

Perez found that a voice-assisted program could rectify the problem and notified hospital leadership, which gave his idea the green light to be installed throughout the hospital.

“Whenever critical lab values come up, like really low hemoglobin or blood levels, it would automatically alert the physicians," Perez said. "It just opened the floodgates of opportunity to leverage this device particularly.”