A Series Of Tubes For The 21st Century

Missing doses due to delays, misplaced medications, error or shrinkage (pilfering, short shipments and other unaccountable loss of goods) is a serious concern of hospitals today. While it doesn’t often get the headlines of more glamorous public policy issues or breakthrough technological advances, it nonetheless has a direct impact on a hospital’s performance, patient satisfaction and the bottom line. 

Quality measurements, hospital profitability, and medical staff and employee satisfaction can all be directly traced to how good a job a hospital does in assuring that the right medication gets to the right patient at the right time. In fact, high patient-satisfaction scores depend on efficient and accurate distribution of medications. Moreover, hospital boards are increasingly being held accountable for patient safety and medical errors – breaches that can occur not only in surgery suites and trauma departments but anywhere throughout the hospital if there isn’t a strict adherence to medication tracking and accuracy. 

Pharmacists receive calls all day long from nurses asking where the medication they ordered is and when it can be expected to be delivered. These calls lead to heavy interruptions and distractions that have shown through published studies to have a direct impact on a pharmacy’s efficiency and error rate.  

As a result, efficient medication tracking has remained a largely unmet demand; and the need for a fail-safe system that can operate across multiple platforms has become increasingly apparent. Fortunately this demand is now being met with innovation applied to traditional pneumatic tube systems.

Hospitals have used tubes for years to send medications from the pharmacy to the nursing unit. While such tubes are efficient and generally reliable from a mechanical operation standpoint, they still have their shortcomings. For one when a tube canister filled with medications leaves the pharmacy, it is in an unsecured and untracked state until final administration to the patient. This can result in lost, misplaced or missing medications causing interruptions to care, unnecessary phone calls and wasted inventory. 

Another challenge is that the tube station at the nursing unit is a busy place. Tubes drop into the holding bin every few minutes; and the intended recipient is often not available, resulting in their medications being handled by an authorized yet unidentified user – leading to misplaced or delayed doses.  

The answer is a lockable and fully traceable pneumatic tube canister and tracking software system that was introduced this month at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. This guarantees the intended receiver is the only person to retrieve the tube’s contents by registering those contents with the specific canister and then locking it at the point of origin. The unlock code is provided when the user swipes their badge or enters a pin into a reader at the receiving station. With the unlock code, the user is able to open the specific container. A receipt transaction is registered in a computerized system, thereby providing real-time medication tracking of delivery and receipt. The product is an elegant solution to a common but longstanding problem and greatly improves the function of existing pneumatic tube infrastructure.

Through utilizing a system such as this, the hospital can eliminate lost and delayed medication deliveries and ensure compliant chain of custody. It can also reduce missing medication distractions, eliminate medication inventory waste, improve medication safety, and enhance communication and efficiency between the pharmacy and nursing. And it frees pharmacists to focus on higher-level patient care and therapeutic activities.

Hospital CEOs and boards have a lot to worry about these days in the wake of healthcare reform, accountable care and population health. Foremost on their list must be the ongoing assurance of patient safety. Focusing on reducing medication delivery errors and delays is a good place to start.

Tony Melanson is vice president of marketing at Aethon, which provides innovative logistics solutions to the healthcare industry.