Technology Stops Medical Mistakes
ivanhoe.com
Technology Stops Medical Mistakes
Reported April 2006
SALT LAKE CITY (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- According to the FDA, at least one person in the United States dies every day from a medication error. Many of those come from giving a patient the wrong dose of a drug or even the wrong drug. Now, new technology could help put an end to those errors.
University of Utah pharmacist Jim Jorgenson says preventing those errors is his main goal "We average about 2 million individual doses of medication a year here," says Jim Jorgenson, R.Ph., a pharmacist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
To eliminate errors, pharmacists now have a new tool -- ValiMed. Medications are drawn up and dropped in the unit. UV light shines on the drug, giving it a fluorescent glow. Just like a fingerprint, every drug has a unique glow based on its chemistry. In 30 seconds, ValiMed tells the pharmacist if he has the right drug.
Jerry Blair, R.Ph., a pharmacist at CDEX Corporation in Kansas City, helped develop the technology. He says, "We started on the high-risk IV medications because those are the most risky medications that pharmacists deal with."
ValiMed eliminates human error by identifying drugs, from risky antibiotic drips to dangerous narcotics. "We would like to see this technology be used at the bedside with every medication," Blair says. ValiMed can even track narcotics in hospitals, making sure the narcotics pharmacists send out to doctors are exactly what are returned.
Soon, ValiMed will be used to test chemotherapy drugs. Jorgenson says, "The goal is zero patient errors for all of this." With the little blue machine, they're getting closer to that goal than ever before.
Currently, ValiMed can identify more than 100 different drugs, but the company is adding more to the list all the time. The technology is currently being used in 12 hospitals across the country.
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Brad Wills
Wills & Associates, Inc.
Rockville, MD
301-767-1919
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