BD Introduces New Technology to Reduce Medication Errors

Today at the Arab Health Exhibition and Congress, BD, a leading global medical technology company, unveiled a state-of-the-art pharmacy solution for preparing intravenous (IV) medication.

Published data has shown that 90 percent of hospital patients receive an IV medication during their stay. However, a manual IV preparation process is prone to errors, with an average error rate of 9 percent for chemotherapy, injectables and infusions that provide patients with nutrition. In addition, 7 percent to 15 percent of oncology budgets are spent on infusions that are prepared but never get used³ resulting in unnecessary waste and expense.

The new BD Cato^TMMedication Solution provides a simplified way for hospitals to manage IV medication to help improve safety and reduce waste. The integrated software and hardware solution enables safe and accurate IV prescribing and compounding through improved communication and coordination between physicians and pharmacists. The new system can be fully integrated into the existing health IT infrastructure of the hospital using standard interfaces such as HL7 and XML. The BD Cato Medication Workflow Solution also supports project-based, individualized interfaces.

“Despite everyone’s best intentions and effort, nearly one in 10 IV medications are incorrectly prepared,” said Maher Elhassan, vice presidentand country general manager BD Middle East & North Africa, vice president and general manager of Medication Management Solutions (MMS), East Europe, Middle East, Africa. “This is most commonly a case of the wrong dose being calculated, but sometimes the wrong diluent is used or the entirely the wrong drug is used.”

Often the error is spotted and the IV preparation discarded, but if it isn’t, the patient could be harmed by receiving the wrong medication. Research has shown that intravenous medication errors have a significantly higher rate of associated deaths than other medication errors.⁴

The new BD Cato Medication Workflow Solution is designed to minimize the possibility of dose and drug errors while streamlining pharmacists’ workflow through standardization of processes including order review, inventory picking and dose preparation.

Dr. Abdulgader Almoeen RPh, MHI, CPHIMS, pharmacy informatics officer (PIO), King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre welcomed the new system and said he hoped to see it being quickly adopted by hospitals across the region.

“BD Cato provides a high-precision gravimetric dosing system with easy-to-use workflow functions that will complement PyxisPharmogistics^® and Pyxis^® ES solutions. Gravimetric is safer and more accurate than volumetric. It is the time to change our practice.”