Medication safety has always been ranked as one of the top clinical risk in healthcare delivery. It is a common challenge to healthcare professionals around the world where unsafe medication practices could lead to errors and subsequently patient harm and increased healthcare cost. Medication Without Harm was identified by WHO as the theme for the third Global Patient Safety Challenge in 2017.
Different strategies have been promoted as risk reduction measures to safeguard medication safety and to improve quality of services as well as to manage ever mounting healthcare cost at the same time. Closed loop medication management, automation, pharmacy informatics, IoT technologies, digitalization, etc. have been well recognized as the key building blocks of a modern medication practice taking into consideration the complexity in operational needs, complicated medication management processes, incomplete or inadequate access to complete drug use information, drug supply & logistics complications, etc. In this session, the experience of implementing Innovative solutions in a new private teaching hospital in Hong Kong for better medication management would be shared.
CUHK Medical Centre is a newly established non-profit private teaching hospital in Hong Kong. In line with the hospital’s mission of pioneering solutions in healthcare, various smart systems have been included from the early stage of hospital design and commissioning to provide patient-centred pharmaceutical care, with focus on medication safety, efficiency and creating value for patients. Some highlights include the first implementation of all-in-one automated unit dose dispensing for inpatient as well as an automated multiple dose dispensing model directly for outpatients in Hong Kong. Building on the hospital eMR system as the common platform, the core elements within the medication management cycle including people, medications, automations/IT systems and data are connected together seamlessly.
