The 340B program provides hospitals with significant savings and revenue when the National Drug Code (NDC) is accurately documented at administration. If a hospital can account for every NDC there are significant wins to the bottom line because lost revenue, purchasing at WAC pricing, and TPA expenses are eliminated. Codonics Safe Label System can help provide 340B hospitals with an ROI.

How is an NDC acquired in the Operating Room?

After a provider prepares a syringe and then manually labels it, the parenteral container (with the NDC) is often discarded and therefore not available for documentation into the patient record. The most accurate way to acquire the NDC is by electronically capturing it via a scan as medications are administered to the patient.

In the perioperative environment, there are only two ways to acquire the NDC:

1. The hospital has to guess which specific NDC was administered to the patient. Often, this is not the exact NDC. And sometimes they don’t guess – they use WAC pricing which can be extremely costly to the hospital.
2. Using Codonics Safe Label System prepared syringes and SLS-WAVE, integrated with Epic or Cerner, acquires the exact NDC of every administration to deliver 340B in the operating room.

A total solution in the Operating Room

Codonics provides your clinicians with tools that ensure pharmacy gets the exact NDC of every vial or ampoule administered to your patients for 340B charge capture – and eliminates handwriting and manual processes for anesthesia.

Using barcode technology, Codonics Safe Label System prints easy-to-ready and ready-to-apply Joint Commission compliant labels during medication preparation. At administration, that label integrates with the EHR/AIMS (e.g. Epic, Cerner and Plexus) enabling the patient record to be electronically documented by a clinician ‘hands free’ with just a “wave” of the syringe label barcode. This not only improves the anesthesia workflow, it ensures the required information is accurately captured for 340B in the operating room.

In the operating room, SLS-WAVE, an accessory to Safe Label System, integrates with your AIMS/EHR for a total solution from preparation to administration. SLS-WAVE is a robust and highly accurate scanner that electronically captures relevant data from the prepared syringe and enables it to be documented ‘hands free’ in the AIMS/EHR workspace. This improves billing accuracy, patient safety, and ensures 340B compliance. Plus, for the first time it also extends BCMA to the operating room to close the loop, providing a complete and accurate record of every administration.

• Improves charge capture and 340B accuracy
• Captures the exact NDC for BCMA everywhere
• Integrates with Epic and Cerner

Without the exact NDC

If a hospital is audited for 340B compliance, they need not prove that a specific NDC was administered, but must prove that they did not purchase more of that specific NDC on 340B than they accumulated administrations on 340B eligible patients.

If facilities are not extremely diligent about updating medications as new NDCs come into pharmacy, old NDCs accumulate that they no longer purchase due to contract changes, shortages, or end of life. If incorrect NDCs are accumulated due to these changes, it is unlikely a facility will be able to use those accumulations to purchase medications at the 340B price. They must instead buy a non-accumulated NDC at the much higher WAC (wholesale acquisition cost) pricing. If inaccurate NDCs accumulate, pharmacy personnel have to invest a lot of time working backwards to find the errors and then updating their AIMS. Not only is this extremely costly to the hospital, it’s also extremely time-consuming.

Join the hundreds of leading hospitals who have implemented the award-winning Safe Label System solution as a standard of care. See Codonics at the 340B Winter Conference, booth #703.