Time Savings of 80% in Medicine Preparation

Process Requirements

The process of preparing medication trays for the surgical area and emergency room is time-consuming and inefficient. At least two employees - a pharmaceutical technician to select the drugs and a pharmacist to verify the composition - were involved. The entire manual verification process took about 30 minutes. The costly, time-consuming and manual process could not 100% eliminate errors in the records, medication shortages or expired shelf life.

Objective

• Saves time when refilling the medication tray
• Workload reduction for employees
• Cost reductions through optimized control, inventory review, and error minimization
• Implementation of tray loading several days in advance

Solution

The drugs are labeled with an RFID label by a third-party supplier. In the storage area, an employee places the medication on the designated tray on the basis of a medication list.

The tray is placed in a stationary cabinet with RFID technology. Within a few seconds, all tagged medicines are recorded. The software system provides information on each individual medication on the tray and compares this stock with the list of requirements.

In case of an incorrect refill or an expired expiration date, a notification is stored in the IT system for correction.

Further implemented functions:

• A semi real time inventory system with "shelf" function: The software automatically compares inventories recorded in different areas of the pharmaceutical industry.
• Drug Shortage Management: Accelerates changes in the system if a drug is no longer in stock.
• Inventory counting: Staff routinely record containers with more than 100 drugs for accurate stock control
• Drug Recall Management: Supports changes in the area of manufacturer partnerships, compounding and repackaging of drugs by pharmacies. The hospital purchases pre-tagged drugs that have been verified by the supplying pharmacy.

Advantages

• Reduction of the required number of employees per tray refill from 2 to 1
• Reduction of working time resources from 60 to 5 minutes
• Increase of the daily output up to 150 tray refills
• Cost reduction
• Increase of inventory accuracy in the medication warehouse to 100 percent
• Reduction of error frequency and increase in patient safety

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