Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle employed the Lean concept of Jidoka — automation with a human touch — to plan for and deploy bar code medication administration technology, which resulted in a decrease in safe practice violations and improvement in medication safety, according to a study published in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.
At the medical center bar code medication administration technology was implemented into the nursing workflow using the three steps of Jidoka:
1. Assigning work to humans and machines on the basis of their differing abilities
2. Adapting machines to the human workflow
3. Monitoring the human-machine interaction
Trained nurses observed a total of 16,149 medication doses for 3,617 patients in a three-year period.
The study found that the number of safe practice violations decreased from 54.8 violations/100 doses to 29 violations/100 doses. The number of medication errors decreased from 5.9 errors/100 doses at baseline to three errors/100 doses after implementation of the bar code medication administration technology. Also, the number of unsafe administration practices decreased.
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