WarfGuide™ Decision Support Software for Warfarin
WarfGuide DSS is designed to provide assistance with warfarin dosing decisions to physicians, nurses and pharmacists by improving their ability to maintain a patient within the therapeutic PT range. It can be used on in-patients to bring them more quickly into range, and on outpatients in a Warfarin Clinic Setting to make sure they remain in the therapeutic range. Automedics expects that WarfGuide DSS will improve the safety and quality of care offered to patients by eliminating error prone manual calculations and complex paper-based nomograms. WarfGuide DSS will individualize dosing and sampling regimens based on patient response. By simply providing the software with the current PT lab result, it provides an individualized Warfarin dosing recommendation designed to achieve the specified target PT range.
WarfGuide replaces spreadsheets of physician preferences and worksheets used by nurses full of manual calculations for managing patient anticoagulation levels. Such methods are inefficient but also susceptible to human error. This approach provides an effective tool to impose centralized and consistent management of anticoagulation. WarfGuide comes with a specific protocol based on sophisticated algorithms focused on anticoagulation control, taking all that complexity at the point of care and replacing with sophisticated mathematical modelling and control laws to patient response in order to individualize their therapy.
WarfGuide DSS will be deployed in several. It can be deployed on existing hospital application servers and any computers already in the hospital environment including nursing stations, patients' rooms, and clinicians' offices. It could also be deployed on free-standing PCs or mobile tablet and computers. WarfGuide DSS can be integrated with an existing health care information system to provide patient location and demographics.
The screens are designed to be simple and intuitive for hospital personnel to use requiring minimal user entry. A screen shot from WarfGuide DSS is shown here:
Example of WarfGuide DSS output screen. Screen shows last PT reading (47 sec); current infusion rate (800 units/hr); recommended warfarin infusion rate (950 units/hr); and optimum time for next PT sample (4 hours at 12:55 pm).
Key Benefits
WarfGuide DSS is designed to reduce the complexity associated with critical Warfarin dosing adjustment decisions and remove human subjectivity. The software is expected to be quick and easy to use, requiring only a few simple inputs, and have customizable targets, allow tracking of a patient's progress, and provide medication administration records and QA reports. The expected benefits include:
- Learns an individual patient's pharmacodynamic response
- Determines and recommends the appropriate dose of Warfarin
- Utilizes multiple data points to avoid single inaccurate results influencing dosing decisions
- Compensates for time delays in obtaining measurements
- Responds to physician-selected high and low limits for PT
- Provides safety alarms and alerts if the patient response is out of range
- Addresses many of the requirements called out by the Joint Commission in their 2008 National Patient Safety Goals for anticoagulants. The Company expects that the ability to control patients within therapeutic range by using WarfGuide DSS will lead to improved outcomes e.g. less bleeding events and lower thromboembolic events, resulting in better patient safety, improved efficiencies, and cost savings in the hospital – and become the standard of care.