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Automated unit-dose packagers for acute care pharmacy

Posted on August 22, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

State of Pharmacy Automation. Pharm Purch Prod. 2010; 8

I was doing a little Sunday morning reading and came across an interesting set of slides at the Pharmacy Purchasing & Products (PPP) website (registration required to access the slides). I haven’t spent much time reading PPP Magazine, but I should because they always seem to have something good about pharmacy automation and technology in just about every issue.

Anyway, I’ve been looking at various automated packaging machines lately and thought the information at the PPP website was rather timely. According to information found at the site “After a slight dip in the number of facilities packaging medications in bar coded unit dose in 2009, this process realized a significant rebound in 2010. Nearly three quarters of all facilities now have such an operation in place. Hospitals taking advantage of the increased data capacity offered by two-dimensional bar codes also bounced back this year. In conjunction with these improving adoption rates, pharmacy directors are also reporting rising satisfaction rates with their operations. Despite a staunch minority that sees no need for a unit dose packaging operation, the vast majority of those without such a system plan to implement one shortly.” The graph in this post is from the PPP slide deck and shows the percentage of facilities using bar-code unit dosed packaging for medications over the past several years. This comes as no surprise when you consider the relative inexpensive nature of this technology when compared to other pharmacy automation, the ease of which it can be implemented and the push for BPOC in healthcare. Call it a perfect storm.
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Categories: Automation, Barcoding | Tags: AutoPack, BCMA, BPOC, Pharmacy Automation

Update: Siemens Innovations 2010 – Day 1

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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Today was the first real working day at Innovations. Yesterday was taken up by all the registration stuff that you have to do when you arrive at a conference, and the welcome reception. Most of the morning was fairly benign as a good chunk of it was taken up by the opening session. I’m not a big fan of opening sessions as they tend to all sound the same. However, I did manage to squeeze in a couple of good sessions in addition to spending some time at the expo. I general love roaming the expo, but this year’s vendor selection is quite small and not really that interesting. It only took me about an hour to run through all the booths and collect a little reading material for later.

One unplanned event that I have to mention was the pleasure of eating breakfast next to Johnathan Paul, a senior engineer in enterprise R & D at Siemens. He casually sat down next to me this morning and asked me what sessions I was planning on attending. I promptly gave him my spiel about attending the various pharmacy sessions, but in addition I lamented the fact that I was going to miss the presentation on “Virtualization, Cloud Computing, SOA, Elasticity, De-Duplication…What Do These Technical Terms Really Mean and How Do We Apply Them?” because it was at the same time as the pharmacy update. I didn’t know at the time, but he was the presenter for that session. After I got past my initial embarrassment we had a great conversation about many of the topics he planned to cover. I came away with some great information and knowledge that Siemens is doing things behind the scenes that makes me downright giddy.
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Categories: Pharmacy Informatics, Siemens | Tags: BCMA, BPOC, CPOE, Siemens, Siemens Innovations, Siemens Pharmacy

Quick Hit – A couple of interesting bar-coding tidbits

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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There were a couple of things about bar-coding in the web-stream that caught my attention today.

The first item was a tweet from @hospitalrx mentioning an application at USA.gov for the iPhone and Android OS that can be used to identify product recalls. The application is appropriately called Recalls.gov.

Now, those recalls are right at your fingertips, thanks to the new RECALLS.GOV mobile application. Whether you’re at your child’s day care center or a yard sale, whether you’re at a store or at home, you can now type a product’s name into your phone and learn immediately whether that product has been recalled because of a safety concern. You can also see photos of recalled products and learn what to do with recalled products in your homes.

Even though the website is lacking detail, the application does offer the ability to scan the bar-code on a given item to determine its recall status, although I have not tested this functionality. Additional mobile applications from USA.gov can be found here.

And from Barcode.com: “Motorola has released a tiny new barcode scanner called the CS3000. The CS3000, shown below, is just about 3.5 inches long, 2 inches wide and less than an inch thick. It weighs only 2.45oz according the Motorola spec sheet. It is capable of scanning 1D barcodes and has a 24 hour battery life. The CS3000 has a USB connector and also Bluetooth. It’s 512MB of flash memory can hold roughly a million bar codes.“

These things are neat. You can download the spec sheet for the Motorola CS3000 scanner here (PDF).

Categories: Barcoding | Tags: Barcode Scanners, BCMA, BPOC

Is the 30-minute rule for medication administration good or bad?

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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The June 17, 2010 issue of ISMP Medication Safety Alert I received has an interesting article on the unintended negative consequences of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulation requiring medications to be administered within 30 minutes of their scheduled dosing time. I’m sure that the CMS 30-minute rule was created with good intentions in mind, but in reality it creates a lot of anxiety and bad habits. According to the ISMP article, the CMS 30-minute rule “may be causing unintended consequences that adversely affect medication safety. While following the 30-minute rule may be important to hospitals, many nurses find it difficult to administer medications to all their assigned patients within the 30-minute timeframe. This sometimes causes nurses to drift into … unsafe work habits.” Those unsafe work habits include removing meds from automated dispensing cabinets (ADC) for multiple patients at once, removing meds ahead of time, falsifying documentation to meet the 30-minute rule and preparing doses ahead of time; all dangerous practices.
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Categories: Medication Safety | Tags: BCMA, BPOC, CPOE, Medication Errors, Medication Safety, Patient Safety

Cool Technology for Pharmacy – NDC Translator

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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Last week I posted about some bar-coding troubles we were having. One of the comments regarding the information in the post was left by a pharmacist named Max Peoples. Max offered up some great information and mentioned a piece of software called NDC Translator from RxScan.

From Max’s comment: “One answer to the medication NDC # barcode scanning problem is to use the software called NDC Translator(TM) with your barcode scanners. Information at http://www.rxscan.com/rx.shtml

It intercepts the raw data coming from the barcode scanner, evaluates it’s content and if it contains the 10 digit NDC # (required to be there by law in a medication barcode) it converts the raw data into the 11 digit NDC # format and then sends the 11 digit NDC over to the application you are scanning into, in this case Jerry’s barcode labeling software.”
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Categories: Cool Technology | Tags: Barcode Scanners, BCMA, BPOC

An almost disastrous bar-coding mishap

Posted on June 23, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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At some point in the past few days it was decided that our technicians should re-label all injectable controlled substances with one of our “after market” flag labels. I’m not sure when or how the decision was made, but it was. When questioned about it, the rationale behind the decision was that the nurses were wasting unused medication at the ADCs and not taking the vial to the bedside. And apparently the solution was to use our flag labels because they offer a peel away section that can be taken to the bedside with the drug in a syringe for scanning and administration purposes.
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Categories: Barcoding | Tags: BCMA, BPOC, Medication Errors, Medication Safety, Patient Safety

Cool Technology for Pharmacy – RxVerify

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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While reading through a pharmacy listserv I came across a seemingly simple piece of software that fills an important gap in the pharmacy distribution process. RxVerify, by Pharmacy Ideas, is a bar-code verification system used during the medication restocking phase for code boxes, anesthesia trays, transport boxes, etc.
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Categories: Barcoding, Cool Technology, Medication Safety | Tags: BCMA, BPOC, Medication Safety, Patient Safety

Bar-code musings

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Jerry Fahrni

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Bar-code verbiage
Last week I posted some examples of difficult bar-codes. The post was well received and generated a fair number of comments; for me anyway. One of the commenters, John Nachtrieb of Fotel, had this to say: “Jerry: Another comment–The ASHP Statement on Barcode Verification (If I’m reading it accurately) speaks about using a barcode to verify that the medication is correct, which is a different usage of the term “verify” than I think you are using. Barcode pro’s use “verify” the same way you do–making sure the symbol is “legible” to the scanner. Then there is the issue of “validation” which, in the parlance of barcode professionals, refers to making sure the barcode correctly identifies the product it’s on.”
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Categories: Barcoding | Tags: BCMA, BPOC

Jerry Fahrni

Automated unit-dose packagers for acute care pharmacy

Update: Siemens Innovations 2010 – Day 1

Quick Hit – A couple of interesting bar-coding tidbits

Top blog posts and searches from last week (27)

Is the 30-minute rule for medication administration good or bad?

Cool Technology for Pharmacy – NDC Translator

An almost disastrous bar-coding mishap

Top blog posts and searches from last week (25)

Cool Technology for Pharmacy – RxVerify

Bar-code musings

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