COMPUTERIZED DRUG DISPENSING SYSTEM

COMPUTERIZED DRUG DISPENSING SYSTEM

ABSTRACT

The healthcare sectors today are looking for opportunities to improve their daily operations efficiencies, increase pharmacist and pharmacy technician efficiency and improves patient care by promoting medication dispensing accuracy and allowing pharmacists to spend more time on patient care activities. The aim of this work is to design and model an Integrative computerized pharmacy inventory system that would have the capability to improve patient care by promoting medication dispensing accuracy and also allow pharmacists to spend more time on patient care activities, using University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH) pharmacy as a case study. The specific objective of the system is to provide better security by more securely controlling access to medications in the pharmacy, Saves space – reduces pharmacy storage footprint, aids in Joint Commission compliance by providing complete audit trail of all transactions. In this paper we adopted the structured system analysis and design methodology (SSADM).

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is used for the model design. The interface between the front-end and the back-end is through SQL (in WAMPSERVER) and through an application program interface (API) defined in PHP. PHP is used as back-end for managing access structures, query evaluation and optimization, concurrency control and recovery. NetBeans IDE was used as front-end to develop forms, report-trail, and graphical user interface

CHAPTER ONE

1.0         Background of the Study

Electronic prescribing (EP) is an integral part of e-Health, which is the use of information and communication technology in healthcare systems. EP does not standalone in hospitals and healthcare facilities. In fact, it is more likely to fail if it occurs in isolation from its overall environment. Based on the reports of Institute of Medicine and many other studies, both the United States and the European Union place emphasis on the greater use of health informatics and EP in all healthcare settings throughout the world. There is increasing evidence that EP is associated with reduced medication errors (MEs), especially in terms of dosage form and omission and commission types of errors in ambulatory and inpatient settings in all specialties. Overall, EP is associated with decreased morbidity and mortality, enhanced quality of healthcare services with less costs, better administrative control, improved working efficiency, and enhanced satisfaction both of healthcare providers and consumers [2-5]. Furthermore, in a systematic review involving 47 sources on prescribing, Porterfield and associates suggested that medication errors are substantially reduced (70%) and cost savings attributed to patients’ outcomes and visits are estimated to be between $140 billion and $240 billion over a decade.