[EASYSCAN: French pilot study for securing drug administration by barcode reading]

Abstract

Objectives: Medication errors are common at the time of administration. To prevent them, technologies allowing consistency check by bar code technology at bedside have been developed. Our study focuses on the evaluation of a BarCode Medication Administration (BCMA) called EASYSCAN with Electronic Medication Administration Record (e-MAR) to verify both patient's identity and medication to be administrated.

Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted during seven weeks in a French medicine ward. The performance of the system was evaluated by the success rate of BCMA and by the average time for administration with and without EASYSCAN. A satisfaction questionnaire about BCMA was proposed to nurses.

Results: We observed 182 administrations including 87 (48%) with EASYSCAN. The verification of the patient's identity was successful in 77% of administrations and 65% of the drugs were scanned successfully. The main causes of check failures were the lack of datamatrix on the drug (81%), error messages (14%) and the lack of system functionality (5%). The average time for administration per patient was significantly increased: 4.68min/patient with versus 2.87min/patient without EASYSCAN.

Conclusions: The study shows the EASYSCAN's performance in its first version. Material and software evolutions and an increase of nurses'pratices will be necessary to continue the experimentation of this system still unpublished in France.

Keywords: Erreur médicamenteuse; Medication errors; Organisation et administration; Patient safety; Système identification patient; Sécurité du patient; Traitement automatique des données; electronic data processing; organization and administration; patient identification systems.