Statistics have shown that patient care malpractice have caused the deaths of some hospital patients. Simple human errors could cause the life of patients in the hospital and that these common human errors are brought about by the wrong administration of drugs to the patient, that sometimes cause ill-effects to the patients’ body or sometimes causing overdose. In the United States alone there are about forty-four thousand to ninety-eight thousand patients who die in a year which is due to medical errors that when prevented could have saved the persons’ life. This malpractices or medical errors is not only costing human lives but also costing the healthcare industry of around $29 Million per year due to the payment for insurance, damages and any other legal cost associated with one simple mistake or error.
To help resolve the problem on the one most common error in the medical field or in hospitals, which is wrong administration of drugs to patients, the SOMC company have developed the WALLaroo 2000, which is a wall station cabinet which is mounted outside every patients’ room where it will be utilised to stock non-narcotic medications before it is going to be dispensed.
This wall station is not just a cabinet on the wall but rather a state of the art wall station for medicine storage, medicine that would only be specific to the patient inside the room, this is to avoid mixing or confusing one patients’ medication with the other. It is the hope of the company that the dispensing of medication’s accuracy would increase and that it would reduce if not completely eradicate such medical error of wrongful dispensing of medicine to the different patients. With the combination of the accurate patients history and accurate medical prescription the hope to eradicate mistakes in dispensing medicine is possible. However, one problem remains and that is since the wall cabinet is mounted outside the patients’ room there is a high security risk that people walking around the corridors of the hospital could just easily insert other medications, a problem that was solved by the incorporation of an access control system to the wall mounted cabinet or the WALLaroo 2000. The company that introduced WALLaroo, SOMC, have thought of utilising not just a normal lock and key system which could easily be broken into by unscrupulous people but a complex access control system that would allow only authorised persons to have access to the medicine inside the patient’s room. In this way only nurses on duty would be able to have access to such medications and that they would be able to dispense only the right medicine for the right patient. It is of this purpose that SOMC has employed the services of the HID EdgeReader in order to provide the needed access control system for the WALLaroo 2000. In the recent test that was conducted by the company, the HID Edgereader was a perfect fit to the design and the needs of the WALLaroo 2000 providing total security to the contents of the medical wall mounted cabinet by providing an accurate access control system.
Tags: Patient Safety Increased By Utilising Access Control System from HID.