Mobile Technology Improves Medication Compliance And Nurse Productivity

By Deb Stroud, RN, Mayo Regional Hospital

Like many of the 1,305 certified Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) in the United States, the nursing, pharmacy and other professional staff at Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, are continually challenged to do more with less. Adding staff is not an option, so to protect patients we must become more efficient. In our hospital, medication administration has been a big patient safety challenge — as it is nationwide.

According to a 2010 report from the National Quality Forum National Priorities Partnership, preventable medication errors cost the U.S. healthcare system $21B annually, with about $16B from inpatient settings alone (NQF Action Brief: A Roadmap for Increasing Value in Health Care. Preventing Medication Errors: a $21B Opportunity, November 2010). A 2006 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report shows that medication errors are the eighth leading cause of death. When all types of errors are accounted for—including late administration and skipped doses that do not lead to obvious injuries — it is estimated that there is at least one medication error per hospital patient per day.

Studies suggest (New England Journal of Medicine. Effect of bar-code technology on the safety of medication administration, 2010 May 6) that electronic medication administration recording (eMAR) systems that use bar coding to verify medication delivery can reduce errors; so in April 2008, we implemented an eMAR system. Our medication error rate did decrease, but the system revealed a significant percentage of our medications were delivered more than one hour after the ordered time, making "wrong time" our most common medication error.

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