Author: Ganapathi Shenoy Argodu Sr. Product Manager, HealthFore Technologies Limited
Introduction
As the healthcare market continues to witness advancement in technology, care providers are now able to move towards safer healthcare practices. This white paper discusses how practices in medication management have seen transformational progression from fewer rights of medication management to current state where the benchmark is against 10 Rights of Medication Management.
Medication administration is a complex multistep process that encompasses prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, and administering drugs and monitoring patient response. Administration errors account for about 30% of total medication errors and nurses only administer most of the drugs to their patients. Nurses can be distracted during their patient interactions with various other work related enquiries and it may lead to enter the information inaccurately, or they may wait to enter information after returning to the central nurse station or some time at the end of ones shift. This will eventually increase the chance that information will be left out or entered incorrectly. The technological advances in the healthcare delivery systems have focused on eliminating each of these errors which may be resulting from drug administration. Adoption of technology that supports real-time data capture and retri has a major impact on nurses workflow and daily activities. Before performing any tasks such as admin-istering medication or a transfusion, nurses can validate a patients identity at the bedside with bar code technology to ensure the right medication and right dose is being delivered to the right patient at the right time.
Rights of Medication Administration to be validated by the nurse during drug administration
Reducing medication errors and enhancing patient safety usingHealthFore Medication Management
HealthFore Solution (Magnum Infinity) supports the closed loop medication management through vari-ous stages from prescribing to drug administration through pharmacist intervention and dispensing of unit dose medication. The Physician determines the prescription for his patient and enters using Health-Fore CPOE. Pharmacy receives order via CPOE, verifies and intervenes before dispensing it using Unit Dose System. Nurses collect patient-specific medications dispensed from the pharmacy into a ward specific unit dose cabinet. Nurses are performing the final check in the process before the drug is being administered to the patient, it is important to ensure that the right drug is administered at the right time and right route to the right patient. The HealthFore solution, using its barcode technology simplifies this validation process and reduces the chance for human error. Patient response to the served medication is recorded by the nurse at the point of care and updated on to the patients EMR. Physician can review and respond quickly to any of the adverse events and monitor the patient response against the treat-ment.
HealthFore solution enhances the effectiveness of the treatments by integrating every aspect of medica-tion safety by capturing real time changes in the drug therapy and the treatments. Automated alerts and error checking in the medication administration process integrated with third party drug knowledge base to support CDSS. This will substantially improve the patient safety and patient experience to yield better clinical outcomes by reducing medication errors.
About Author
Ganapathi Shenoy Argodu (Sr. Product Manager, HealthFore Technologies Limited) has over 24 years of experience in Hospital domain & healthcare IT. Shenoy is a qualified Pharmacist with experience in healthcare IT consulting, product management, pre-sale support and customer engagement. He is one of the key architects and SME involved in business process reengineering and product design of Pharma-cy Information System and closed loop medication management for Ministry of Health (MOH), Malaysia.
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