Pharmacy tracking system cuts med waste at hospital

The pharmacy at a large Ohio hospital is claiming to have reduced waste by 32 percent with the help of a medication tracking system. Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus says missing-medication requests are down to about 90 per day from 150 to 175 since the pharmacy department implemented MedBoard, a product of Bellevue, Wash.-based Pharmacy OneSource, last July.

The hospital expects to save $150,000 this year by reducing pharmacy waste and saving staff time as the system tracks more medications and gets rolled out to additional nursing units. Patients should see medications delivered faster, hospital officials add.

With MedBoard, pharmacists and nurses scan medication labels at each step in the delivery process to track order status and location, and prevent lost doses. "We like to call it the 'FedEx of the pharmacy world' because it tracks the medications that nurses are waiting for just like FedEx tracks a package," Charles McCluskey, Riverside Methodist's director of pharmacy and pulmonary services, tells Healthcare IT News.

For more:
- see this Healthcare IT News story

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