Off-hours unavailability of drugs during emergency situations with automated drug dispensing machines

Do automated dispensing machines improve patient safety?

A 'time and motion' evaluation of automated dispensing machines in the emergency department.

BACKGROUND There has been limited assessment of the impact that automated medication dispensing machines have on the medication administration process, particularly in Australian emergency departments. The aim of this study is to examine the change in medication retrieval times, number of medications retrieved and staff perceptions before and after the installation of automated dispensing machi...

Health care professionals’ perspectives on automated multi-dose drug dispensing

BACKGROUND During the 1980s, manual repackaging of multi-dose medications from pharmacies in Sweden was successively substituted with automated multi-dose drug dispensing (MDD). There are few studies evaluating the consequences of automated MDD with regard to patient safety, and those that investigate this issue are not very extensive. OBJECTIVES To investigate Swedish health care professiona...

Automated Detection of Off-Label Drug Use

Off-label drug use, defined as use of a drug in a manner that deviates from its approved use defined by the drug's FDA label, is problematic because such uses have not been evaluated for safety and efficacy. Studies estimate that 21% of prescriptions are off-label, and only 27% of those have evidence of safety and efficacy. We describe a data-mining approach for systematically identifying off-l...

Outcome of primary angioplasty for acute myocardial infarction during routine duty hours versus during off-hours.

OBJECTIVES We sought to investigate the impact of circadian patterns in the onset of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) on the practice of primary angioplasty. BACKGROUND A circadian variation in the time of onset of AMI with a peak in the morning hours has been described. METHODS We studied 1,702 consecutive patients with acute ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction treated with primary...