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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Clare TolleyORCiD, Neil Watson, Professor Sarah Slight
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2022. The Author(s). 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.
Author(s): Tolley CL, Watson NW, Heed A, Einbeck J, Medows S, Wood L, Campbell L, Slight SP
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Year: 2022
Volume: 22
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 29/03/2022
Acceptance date: 16/03/2022
Date deposited: 19/04/2022
ISSN (electronic): 1472-6947
Publisher: BioMed Central Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-022-01828-3
DOI: 10.1186/s12911-022-01828-3
PubMed id: 35351096
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