Dec 28 2010
The University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) has recently given a presentation titled ‘From Dock to Bedside: Automating the Entire Medication Use Process’ at the midyear conference of the American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP) in Anaheim, California.
At the presentation, UMMC revealed that it has enhanced delivery cycle time, improved nurse satisfaction and minimized personnel expenditures using MedEx, a complete medication tracking system from Aethon.
Marc Summerfield, Director of Pharmacy at UMMC, has given the presentation in the conference. He pointed out four enhancements within the pharmacy of the health system as a result of using the MedEx. The four enhancements include reduction in missing medications incidents, increased nursing time at the bedside, sustainability and greater dose accountability.
The MedEx system that can be incorporated with Aethon’s TUG robots is the first comprehensive automated chain-of-custody solution for the hospital pharmacy market. It integrates robotics with biometric (fingerprint) security, secure carts, lock boxes, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers at nursing places. The system can trace the chain-of-custody history and real-time location of every prescription by utilizing the RFID tag on every dose.
Katherine Mulligan of UMMC commented that the TUG robots have eradicated the requirement for paperwork, signatures, substance count management and keys for the lock box.