Centralized versus Decentralized Drug Logs – Which One Are You?
In HQ, most clinics use a Centralized drug draw, meaning one person or team pulls up the drugs.
The most common flow for this is you have one or two people that draw up the induction drugs for the whole clinic. This could be a veterinarian or LVT under the supervision of a veterinarian. We are not talking about pre-med drugs, we know that’s done at the time the animal is examined. This specifically refers to drawing up the induction drugs. In Patient Flow these are the drugs under the “Drug Draw” screen.
The opposite of a Centralized drug draw method is a Decentralized drug draw method.
In this method, small teams each have their own set of drugs. Each team maintains it’s own drug log for the patients they serve. Instead of pulling one set of drugs out of a drug locker, there are multiple small baskets of drugs that are pulled out for each team. This drug draw method is rare for most clinics, however, this is the method the ASPCA Spay/Neuter Alliance uses. They use this method because they do about 100 pets per day utilizing four surgical teams. Each team is responsible for their own drug log.
We do have surgical teams. Should we use a decentralized method?
It really has more to do with the very specific point in your flow of drawing up induction drugs. If you have one person that draws those up and then distributes to multiple teams that’s still a centralized method. If you have multiple teams and you want them to be fully responsible for multiple people drawing up induction drugs, that is the decentralized method.
