Background and Importance Hospital San Raffaele was seeking a solution to improve the medication management process and logistics, spanning from central pharmacy to the patient’s bedside, in order to avoid shortage, improve staff well-being and patient safety by ensuring the five rights of medication administration (patient, drug, dose, time and route).

Aim and Objectives The Covid emergency, the shortage of personnel and the need to control healthcare spending, are key drivers in seeking innovative solutions to improve the efficiency in drugs and medical devices logistics.

The new system includes a new generation of automated carts and cabinets: before each round, the software predicts the overall need for drugs/medical devices.

The drugs are automatically loaded into the carts without any human intervention.

During the round, once the patient is identified, the automated cart retrieves the drug(s) to be administered and places them directly on the countertop.

The system tracks all the operations: which drug was administered, at what time and by whom.

The new system enables end-to-end traceability ensuring the complete visibility to the hospital pharmacists/staff on drug flows from the central pharmacy up to medicines’ administration and bringing many benefits such as: logistics optimisation and inventory accuracy by avoiding waste and shortage, while guaranteeing precise recalls/withdrawals and having a real-time visibility on the entire hospital stocks.Material and Methods

The study compared the new AUTOMATED solution versus the TRADITIONAL one by measuring different metrics and KPI.

A panel of nurses was selected to conduct the test with different profiles (age, experience, and confidence with IT applications). Each nurse was asked to carry on some cycles of the therapy dispensing and to express evaluations, in a ranking from 1 to 5, on several parameters related to:

• Tracking of all operations

• Patient Safety

• Ergonomics

• Efficiency

Conclusion and Relevance The results show that the automatic system is prevailing over all target metrics, with particularly a high gap on safety and efficiency, thanks to the reduction of non-value-added activities such as manual drugs replenishment of the stocks within cabinets and carts, enabling what really matters: the Patient Care.

This provides to the healthcare systems a new disruptive platform that makes the work of hospital staff easier, more efficient, reliable thus ensuring patient safety.

Conflict of Interest No conflict of interest