Advantech, a leading industrial Internet of Things (IoT) company, recently announced that it has assisted Pingtung Veterans General Hospital with an innovative medication management model using the IoT, making it the first hospital in Taiwan to implement Closed Loop Medication Administration (CLMA) on a large scale to digitize medication management in the medical industry.

According to Li Jia-yan, senior business manager of Advantech Intelligent Healthcare, the medication dispensing process is considered one of the most error-prone areas of healthcare because of the many tedious human interventions required to deliver medication from the hospital pharmacy to the patient, and even with a well-established management system, the risk of potential oversight during manual checks is inevitable. Therefore, the Internet of Things (IoT) is the only way to truly implement closed-loop management, which can enhance drug safety and reduce the pressure on nursing staff to worry about errors.

Li further explained that the Pingtung Veterans General Hospital has adopted Advantech's AMiS closed-loop medication management solution, which uses RFID technology as the core with electronic paper to automatically update information, linking each process of drug delivery from the pharmacy to the inpatient ward and then to the patient. This reduces the rate of errors and ensures the safety and accuracy of medication dispensing and administration.

In other words, after the introduction of the Smart Medication Solution, the pharmacist only needs to match the medication at the pharmacy through the RFID smart box setting station and place the medication required by each patient in the RFID smart box according to the doctor's orders.

Once the smart cartridge arrives at the nursing station, the nurse practitioner simply puts the cartridge into the mobile smart cartridge and when it is time to administer the medication, the nurse practitioner simply senses the patient's bracelet barcode and the mobile smart cartridge will automatically pop up the patient's cartridge to ensure the correct administration of medication. For controlled medication, there is also a lightweight smart medicine cabinet at the nursing station for medication management.

In addition, Advantech has also developed its own intelligent medication management system, iMedication, which can be integrated with the hospital's HIS/NIS system, so that pharmacists can view medical orders and dispense medication based on the platform.

Advantech said that Pingtung General Hospital is not only the first hospital in Taiwan to implement large-scale closed-loop medication management, but also the first closed-loop medication management application in the world.