Study: How Virginia Mason Medical Center Successfully Improved Medication Safety

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.

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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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