PATI ENT SAFE T Y
The Autonomous Pharmacy vision: a strategic concept for the future There are certain key areas in which the Autonomous Pharmacy will ensure prime performance, and these are safety, finance, efficiency, regulatory compliance and people. It has been found that poor systems and processes that are not in sync lead to human error – health systems dispensing more than 5m doses of medication will experience 25,000 mistakes annually.3
A robust,
integrated system with automated medication management systems and processes will help protect patients across the care sector. Soaring
healthcare costs would also plateau with such technology, due to a reduction in error and more effective stock management. The healthcare system also suffers from inefficiency. There is a huge reliance on manual labour for medication management which sees highly trained nurses and pharmacists responsible for ordering, verifying, retrieving, mixing, counting and dispensing medications. Combined with a lack of centralised data and thorough drug tracking, time is wasted searching for data and it is harder to predict and manage medication shortages.
The Autonomous Pharmacy would take on all elements of medication logistics, reducing errors and confusion, and freeing up more time for healthcare providers. This advanced system would also be able to complete and document all the necessary tasks and processes required for regulatory compliance, meaning it would not fall to highly trained medical professionals to complete by hand. Finally, medication management systems affect many people, from patients to medical professionals to healthcare organisations. Time wasted on manual drug distribution and dealing with the consequences of dispensing errors can increase burnout, dissatisfaction and stress among healthcare providers and adversely impacts clinical outcomes. With the Autonomous Pharmacy, health systems are able to welcome a more patient focussed pharmacy model, consequentially leading to higher patient and staff satisfaction. From this, it is clear that when medication management processes are fully automated, data is used effectively to provide actionable information. Automation is not a replacement for humans, but a replacement for human error. It will lead to a redistribution of human talent to where it matters – patient care. There are five key components that industry leaders see working in tandem to make up the Autonomous Pharmacy model: enterprise structure, IT infrastructure, automation, data intelligence and human activity. Pharmacy is not confined to the acute care setting. The enterprise structure of a
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WWW.CLINICALSERVICESJOURNAL.COM OCTOBER 2020
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