Project ADAPT (Automated Dispensing of Accurate Prescription Therapy)

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2009

Project ADAPT is a first-of-its-kind venture undertaken by a county multi-disciplinary team to address the challenges of distributing medications safely to thousands of county residents in their care. This five-year project was initiated by the Probation Department to improve medication safety and accuracy for 600 juvenile corrections patients. In now includes the Sheriff’s Department for 6500 adult corrections patients, and Arrowhead Regional Medical Center for all inpatient and outpatient pharmaceutical services. In addition to dramatically improving patient safety, the project expected to pay for itself over its lifetime. The overall goals for this project are to: provide the highest level of patient health and safety through the accurate administration of medications; reduce wasted medications in the workflow process; improve staff efficiencies to enable current staff to manage increasing workloads; and improve nursing job satisfaction to help retain and attract nurses to this service in the face of a national nursing shortage. To meet these goals, the multiple-department team set out to improve integration of existing healthcare systems, eliminate redundancies in data entry and workflow, and utilize automated barcode inventory and dispensing systems at local and remote locations. By automating this complex process, the project will reduce the error-prone manual processes that were previously in existence, leverage pharmacy involvement with centralized order review and clinical support an decentralize the actual packaging and labeling of medications to each of eight different patient care areas located across the county to enable up-to-the-minute medication administration.