No one involved in patient care ever wants to hear the words “wrong medication” or “wrong dose.” Efforts to reduce medication errors have succeeded in part, but potentially damaging mistakes still occur.
New technologies are now providing significant help to further reduce adverse drug events. Equipment once thought of as only available to large acute-care hospitals is becoming increasingly available to long-term care facilities. By utilizing these technologies, facilities can easily and affordably address all the challenges of medication management: efficiency, security and yes, error prevention.
Medication management technologies typically include locked, automated dispensing cabinets located on individual floors or departments within a facility. Some are simply locked cabinets, while other systems offer integrated software that ties them to the pharmacy and, in some cases, to electronic medical records (EMRs).
One advantage of these technologies is that they make the right drugs available to caregivers. Drugs stored in automated dispensing units on site can be monitored remotely by a pharmacist who ensures that medications are stocked appropriately for patients’ needs. This helps eliminate the need for a traditional “ekit” while providing a greater variety and quantity of medications. The systems also help reduce stat-runs and pharmacy capture-charges because the medications nurses need are on hand, and they offer all-important security for all medications, including controlled medications.
Mobile medication carts are common in long-term care, where medicine administration might occur at the bedside, the cafeteria, or elsewhere. Now one system, the AccessRx MD from TouchPoint Medical, extends the automated, secure system to mobile carts, thus allowing medications, the EMR system, and supplies to be safely and securely brought directly to the patients, wherever they may be in the facility.
Along with the physical security, software is a key component, tying the total medication management system together to track medication through the chain of possession. It can validate the identity of a caregiver who accesses drugs, confirm that medications and doses removed from the system match the assigned patients’ EMRs, and validate that the right patient receives the right medication and approved dosage at the correct time.
When it comes to putting all this technology together, an ideal workflow becomes the end result. When a nurse is ready to deliver medications to assigned patients, the automated dispensing cabinets’ security software unlocks only the appropriate medication drawers based on identity verification for both the caregiver and patient records. Those medications can then be loaded into individual drawers in a medication delivery cart. Then at the point of delivery, the nurse scans the barcode on a patient’s wristband, and the cart’s software unlocks the appropriate drawer and records in the EMR that the drug has been administered.
At the cart, as well as at the dispensing cabinet, software can alert nurses that they are handling a look-alike or sound-alike drug – a key contributor to errors in medication administration – and require them to verify that they have double-checked the medication before proceeding. Systems also can display drug names in tall-man lettering for clarity and flag concerns about allergic reaction or interactions to a given medication. Nurses know these facts, but with the right medication management software, they can receive important reminders and up-to-the-minute changes at the point of delivery. The technology is able to prevent us from hearing “wrong medication” or “wrong dose” – phrases surely no one will miss.
Author info: Brian McNeill is President & CEO of TouchPoint Medical, a leading global provider of innovative and intelligent hardware and software solutions for healthcare (www.touchpointmed.com).
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