Background Given the need for customised total parenteral nutrition (TPN) formulations addressing infants and children, their preparation constitutes an everyday practice for paediatric hospitals’ pharmacy departments, forming a time-consuming, complex and error-prone procedure.

Purpose To identify the benefits following the integration of an ICT-assisted intervention of prescribing and preparing 12 per day TPN formulations (365 days/year), in a 400-bed paediatric hospital.

Material and methods In order to achieve a thorough comparison, all steps of pre- and post-established procedures of TPN formulations’ preparation were investigated in terms of time and human resources’ consumption. Safety issues, medical staff’s satisfaction and improved communication between the hospital pharmacy and actual point of care, were taken into consideration, as well.

Results During the first semester of 2018, the previous manually-held prescription procedure of ordering TPN formulations was incorporated into the main hospital pharmacy’s information system (HPIS). This intervention resulted in a 35% reduction in pharmacists’ implementation time for controlling and finalising TPN prescriptions, while an overall 80% decrease in total preparation time, was observed. The elimination of the transcription step of the procedure decreased interpretation and calculation errors’ occurrence. Legible prescriptions, entered at patients’ bedside, are automatically transferred to the main HPIS, while all the information concerning the final TPN formulation is available even on doctors’ mobile phones through Quick Response Codes labelling.

Conclusion Technology-enabled care interventions can assure faster and safer preparation of TPN formulations as well as eliminating unnecessary and error-prone steps in the procedure. Additionally, apart from saving crucial time for healthcare professionals, an essential information exchange is supported through the integration of patient medication records (kept at the HPIS) with the TPN record (kept at the compounding device’s information system).

References and/or acknowledgements None.

No conflict of interest.