How a Barcode Technology Application Helped MUSC Health Reduce Medication Errors and Spur Further Innovation
by Beju Shaw, Clinical Informatics Pharmacist at Medical University of South Carolina
Medication errors are extremely costly, to both the patient and the healthcare institution. See how the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) used a QuickBase sandbox environment to build new technology to combat errors and rally administration support.
Electronic health record (EHR) systems are changing the way care is administered in medical institutions around the world. They provide clinicians the ability to seamlessly hand-off patients by offering real-time data that ensures continuity of care. However, at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), we observed that EHRs also introduced new types of errors, specifically, barcode medication errors.
As part of the Medication Use Policy & Informatics team at MUSC, it’s my duty to mitigate these types of errors. My challenge was to make sure that the incoming inventory of medication was screened and validated, to ensure that it would be correctly recognized by our health system from the moment it arrived at our facility to the point of administration to patients. The pharmacy would act as an intermediary, responsible for identifying medication barcodes to ensure they matched the data in our IS systems.
Before we used QuickBase to build our own barcode validation software, we — like most health systems across the country — relied on managing by exception through self-reporting, which meant we were addressing barcode medication errors in a reactive manner. The inability to manage proactively created a gap in our medication use process, which is what prompted us to take action and create a system that was highly functional and could be used to parse and manage medication data on a daily basis.
First, we knew we needed to do a wholesale scanning of all our inventory. Collecting this data was the first step in getting organized. We started by having our pharmacy technicians, who are the main inventory procurement personnel, scan the barcode of each and every medication on a daily basis. This rudimentary process was a good start, but it was highly inefficient, often taking an hour to an hour and a half of each technician’s day across multiple sites. In addition to this, there was an added time cost incurred for the Pharmacy IS team when it came to identifying and resolving issues.
To improve on these inefficiencies, we decided to implement an QuickBase sandbox, where we created a form with a standardized set of values that would allow technicians to report medication issues, as well as note the product identifier tied to that specific medication, and request assistance. Next, we began to create a way to manage these issue requests. For example, we created a queue that handled tasks by priority. Once we were able to manage tasks, we started seeing where we could further streamline the various processes, repackaging bulk products, for example, that branched off from the main processes. This further streamlining was an unexpected side-effect that proved very beneficial…
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