Dose Administration Aids
Use of Dose Administration Aids (DAAs) in Australia is common, having been adopted as a means of reducing medicine errors and increasing the efficiency of medicine administration, and adherence.
Manual packing
Good manual blister packing technicians are highly prized and coveted by their pharmacies. A good technician can manually pack between 8 and 15 patients per hour, depending on medication complexity and other factors such as preparation, software and medication availability.
How accurate?
Many studies have been completed over the years to identify and benchmark the error rates of the manual blister DAA packing process. Results vary from relatively low (single digit percentages) to alarmingly high percentages of 40% or more.
The tragic reality is that medication packing errors can have devastating results, as evidenced recently in New Zealand with the methotrexate deaths.
While all Pharmacists would agree that accuracy must remain the highest priority, many questions remain of how to maintain speed and profitability in a market that’s being squeezed ever tighter.
- How do I free up staff to seek new business?
- How do I regain the ability to grow my business?
- How do I increase the quality of my product to my customers?
- How do I develop, implement and maintain a scalable business model?
Announcing the future
A new pharmacy robot may be the breakthrough pharmacists have been waiting for, finally integrating the speed of automation, with the accuracy of precision equipment. And last weekend the revolution began!
The Van den Brink Machine (VBM) Automated Blister Packing Solution, hailed as important to pharmaceutical packing as the introduction of vision checking machines and as much a game-changer, was launched in Australia at APP2015.
The VBM combines Dutch design, innovation and engineering to be the first robot to pack and check multi-dose blister cards with the potential for digital dose adherence monitoring. Australian firm, Dose Innovations, is the first globally to adopt this technology from Netherlands-based market leader in medicine verification techniques, Global Factories.
Faster, smaller and more accurate dispensing robots are not a new concept in pharmacy, designed to reduce the risk of human error. Some now can fill complex personalised blister packs in seconds with a low error rate, but are very large and expensive, demanding a dedicated area to store each patient’s medicines.
The VBM, however, can take automated dispensing to the next paradigm by packing unit and multi-dose blister cards that are then checked digitally using Global Factories’ unique and patented Medicine Detection Machine (MDM). The MDM is already proven internationally, ensuring the accuracy of millions of DAA pouches every day.
The MDM system makes distribution of medicine safer and more efficient than ever thought possible. There is traceable surveillance of blister packing, logging detailed information about all checked blisters – each is photographed during optical detection and the image stored for review. Once programmed correctly, the MDM results in the lowest false alarm rate in the world, compared to other checking machines.
The advantages of automation are exponential and self-evident: greatly increased productivity and more time for medication counselling and customer service, training and upskilling of staff, and business administration and development.
Administration around your medication management is streamlined by the VBM, freeing you up to understand and mitigate the often complex issues underlying poor adherence and make a real difference to patient outcomes.
VBM at a Glance
- Cartridge capacity: 200
- Unit dimensions (m): W 1600 mm x H 2000 mm x D 835 mm
- Weight: ~400–625 kg
- Speed: Up to 50 blister packs filled and checked per hour