Do you know what “ADC” in pharmacy stands for? Do you know what it does and why it’s important? Here’s a look at some ADC safety tips. Then, you can use them to improve your pharmacy’s safety and efficiency. If you’re in a position to manage ADCs, you’ll appreciate these tips! Just remember to practice what you preach! Keeping these tips in mind will make your pharmacy’s safety and efficiency a whole lot easier!
An ADC is a pharmacy’s digital inventory. It’s used to track drug-related transactions and automatically send replenishment orders to a central pharmacy. This means that you’ll no longer have to worry about making multiple replenishment orders a day or manually storing them. It also helps you manage your inventory more efficiently and reduce the risk of error-prone medication management. There are a few other ADCs safety tips that you can use to improve your pharmacy’s overall safety.
ADCs help the entire process of drug administration. They reinforce the five rights of medication. By selecting the patient on a screen, medical staff is guided to select the right medication and dispense the correct dosage. In addition, dispensing alerts will show warnings to the staff so they don’t accidentally give the wrong medication to the wrong patient. ADCs will ensure that the right drugs are dispensed at the right time, dose, and route.
Automated dispensing cabinets help reduce drug costs and shorten the payoff time for an investment. Pharmacies can also reduce time for drugs. In fact, some pharmacy departments have already experienced these benefits in a few weeks. With such a significant savings, an ADC can save an average of 30% of a hospital pharmacy’s drugs! There are many benefits to utilizing these devices. The benefits of these machines far outweigh the time it takes to pay off the cost of the system.
While there are some cases in which a life-saving medication has been removed from an ADC without an order, the majority of the time, this has been done for medications for which an order has been anticipated. This includes epidural analgesics like fentaNYL, moderate sedative drugs in the emergency department, and antibiotics for infections. Despite the risk involved, removal of medication from an ADC without an order is considered very rare.
ADC also improves closed loop medication management. Improved medication management practices increase patient safety and operational efficiency. They also reduce medication waste and loss. ADCs help decrease manual error by reducing errors and ensuring medication safety. LEDs on drawer exteriors direct caregivers to the right drawer. Despite the advantages of the ADC, the majority of nurses remained satisfied with the new system and welcomed it. If you are looking for an ADC, check out these tips.
ADCs are linked to point-of-care bar-coding systems that make sure the selected and prescribed medication is matched electronically. Studies have shown mixed results, however, and one government-funded compilation of evidence noted that ADCs reduced medication-administration errors by as much as 30 percent. The problem was that many studies were conducted before the advent of important software and hardware enhancements. This means that few studies have been conducted that correlate the design of ADCs to errors. However, error-reporting programs have identified several factors that affect the effectiveness of ADCs.
