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The impact of a novel medication scanner on administration errors in the hospital setting: a before and after feasibility study

Tolley, Clare L.; Watson, Neil W.; Heed, Andrew; Einbeck, Jochen; Medows, Suzanne; Wood, Linda; Campbell, Layla; Slight, Sarah P.

The impact of a novel medication scanner on administration errors in the hospital setting: a before and after feasibility study Thumbnail


Authors

Clare L. Tolley

Neil W. Watson

Andrew Heed

Suzanne Medows

Linda Wood

Layla Campbell

Sarah P. Slight



Abstract

Objective: The medication administration process is complex and consequently prone to errors. Closed Loop Medication Administration solutions aim to improve patient safety. We assessed the impact of a novel medication scanning device (MedEye) on the rate of medication administration errors in a large UK Hospital. Methods: We performed a feasibility before and after study on one ward at a tertiary-care teaching hospital that used a commercial electronic prescribing and medication administration system. We conducted direct observations of nursing drug administration rounds before and after the MedEye implementation. We calculated the rate and type (‘timing’, ‘omission’ or ‘other’ error) of medication administration errors (MAEs) before and after the MedEye implementation. Results: We observed a total of 1069 administrations before and 432 after the MedEye intervention was implemented. Data suggested that MedEye could support a reduction in MAEs. After adjusting for heterogeneity, we detected a decreasing effect of MedEye on overall errors (p = 0.0753). Non-timing errors (‘omission’ and ‘other’ errors) reduced from 51 (4.77%) to 11 (2.55%), a reduction of 46.5%, which had borderline significance at the 5% level, although this was lost after adjusting for confounders. Conclusions: This pilot study detected a decreasing effect of MedEye on overall errors and a reduction in non-timing error rates that was clinically important as such errors are more likely to be associated with harm. Further research is needed to investigate the impact on a larger sample of medications.

Citation

Tolley, C. L., Watson, N. W., Heed, A., Einbeck, J., Medows, S., Wood, L., …Slight, S. P. (2022). The impact of a novel medication scanner on administration errors in the hospital setting: a before and after feasibility study. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 22(1), Article 86. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01828-3

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 16, 2022
Online Publication Date Mar 29, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Apr 26, 2022
Publicly Available Date Jun 21, 2022
Journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Publisher BioMed Central
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 22
Issue 1
Article Number 86
DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01828-3
Related Public URLs https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35351096/

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.





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