Effects of Automated Dose-Dispensing System on Medication Management Process

Abstract

Medication management process in a hospital includes all the work that is done concerning to a certain patient’s medical treatment. According to international studies, the process is very prone to errors, which can cause adverse drug events and endanger the patient safety. In this paper, we will show how medication management process can be improved by a user-centric and computer-based automated dose-dispensing system. We will focus on the changes in medication management process, when the automated dose-dispensing system is implemented into practice. As a result of this implementation, we get a model for decision-making in medication management process and several benefits, like hygienic medication doses, smaller medication warehouses at wards and in the pharmacy. Additionally with the automated dose-dispensing system, pharmacists have to review patients’ medication regimen before dispensing medications in order to identify possible interactions. However, during medication dispensing in the hospital pharmacy, error rate was discovered to be 0.36%. In wards the error rate was 0.013%. Regardless of these, the use reliability of the ADDS was noticed to be 100%.