INTENDED OUTCOME
The right drug with the right diluent for the right dose at the right time has been and remains the ever-present responsibility of a pharmacist. The introduction of IV Workflow Management systems (IVWFM) into the sterile compounding space has significantly reduced the effort and improved the chances of consistently meeting this responsibility. This type of quality assurance verification has been the primary use of IVWFM systems since their introduction into the United States in 2008 when DoseEdge Pharmacy Workflow Manager system (DoseEdge) was introduced.
However, the pharmacist’s responsibilities continue to grow with the increasing number and ever more strict regulations and guidelines governing the processes for compounding sterile preparations and the environments they are prepared in. Therefore, pharmacists must consider how these IVWFM systems can be used to support these needs.
CHALLENGES
Accurate and consistent data from published literature on the incidence of IV compounding errors is difficult to find as most facilities and pharmacists are reluctant to share this type of information. Confounding this is the fact that there is no single recognized definition of what constitutes these types of medication errors. The relatively small number of data sets that are available for error rates at individual facilities or groups of facilities not using any type of IVWFM system (or technology-assisted workflow systems) can range from 0.22%1 to 9%2. These errors can result from pharmacy staff not knowing with specificity what drugs, diluents, and volumes should be used to prepare a compounded sterile preparation (CSP). Before automation, pharmacists had to verify every CSP dispensed from the cleanroom using manual and sometimes inexact methods. It was not always possible to determine if the correct drug and/or amount was added to an IV container. Therefore, the true number of compounding errors could not be determined. Read more >
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