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Pharmacy Smart Guidance System with E-paper

3/22/2020

Hospital scale in Taiwan is getting larger. Equipped with hundreds to thousands of beds, maintaining patient safety and improving medical quality becomes the top priority. 

Inpatient’s dispensing workflow has several steps. Including physicians order, pharmacists adjust, check dispense and send, and nurses deliver to inpatients. Though there is some SOP like "three readings and five pairs" to prevent error, still, each patient's medication is different, also adjusted according to the patient’s condition, which increases the difficulty of improving the dispensing process.

Medical centers in central Taiwan then cooperated with Advantech, developing a smart drug guidance system and introducing Advantech's LEO-D E-paper to make the dispensing process smoother. 

E-paper is a new type of display system that combines the advantages and characteristics of paper and flexible electronic displays. Relying on external light sources, E-paper has feasible strong light condition visibility and a 180-degree viewing wide angle.

Currently, medical center have placed E-paper as a digital bedside card, UD cart kit label (Unit Dose Distribution cart), STAT medicine cart kit label and medicine rack storage card, connecting inpatients’ overall medical process.

Advantech's E-paper can display high-level and detailed still pictures, which is helpful for medical staff to identify and has black, white, and red three-color display functions. Besides, it can stably display the patient's name and bed number.

At the same time, the QR code blank on E-paper can provide medication records and inventory records according to different project requirements. Such information records play a key role in medical decision-making. The records are dynamic and can be updated immediately through E-paper.

E-paper and wireless mobile devices make content switching easily, which has become major progress in the process of promoting smart medical treatment.

E-paper can be automatically wirelessly connected. Their UD carts, digital bedside cards, etc. can be directly connected to the Health Information System (HIS). Besides the function of Anti-interference long-distance signal transmission, the nursing team can be clearer when handing over shifts; even the anonymous function that meets clinical needs can improve patient privacy and security. The application of E-paper simplifies the operation process, can reduce human errors, improves safety, enables nursing staff to focus more on clinical care, and improves the quality of hospitalization for patients.

Also, in the pharmacy room, the E-paper application of storage cards has opened a new page for smart medicine.

There are plenty of drugs in the pharmacy storage room need to be controlled. At present, it mainly relies on manual inventory by pharmacists. E-paper is introduced as a rack storage card. It can present the number of drugs in real-time against high alarms, high unit price drugs, etc., through inventory and safety.

The mechanism of updating the display content on time and within 7 to 14 seconds can reduce the human error caused by picking up and releasing medicine, improve the efficiency of drug management, and ensure the safety of patients' medication.

E-paper provides multiple flexible fixing methods for peripheral equipment. Such as screw locking, self-adhesive bonding, bundling, and other methods. Medical centers also tested on refrigerated medicines, replacing the medicine shelves with E-paper storage cards. And it can be connected and updated smoothly under low temperature and glass barrier conditions.

The first-line medical staff of a medical center gave E-paper highly evaluated and satisfactory, which was a very successful step for the hospital to promote the improvement of smart medical procedures.

In the future, the application of E-paper is expected to be extended to other medical institutions to assist hospitals in achieving smart medical promotion and better medical quality.