By Julie Fay
Contributor
7/10/08

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The Bedside Medication Verification system, or BMV, dramatically reduces the possibility of medication errors for hospital patients. Using barcode and scanner technology, the system allows medical personnel to match patients to their medicine and acts as a safety net to check for errors prior to the patient receiving the drug.
“BMV is taking a technology that we’re accustomed to seeing every day, which is barcoding, and
applying it to the administering of medications,” says Joseph Raduazzo, M.D., chief medical officer of
Milton Hospital.
This may not seem like a big deal at first but the National Institutes of Health says that between 44,000 and 98,000 people die annually because of medical errors in hospitals. Many of the deaths are a result of medication problems.
Each Milton Hospital patient receives an armband that contains a unique identifying barcode. Each medication in the hospital pharmacy also has a distinctive barcode, including individual barcodes for different dosages. When a nurse scans a patient’s armband, the patient’s computerized medication record is displayed on a computer screen. The nurse then scans the medication to be administered, and if the patient, medication, dosage or time is wrong, the computer warns the nurse of the mistake.
But BMV doesn’t stop there, according to Raduazzo. He says the system helps the hospital follow the “five rights” for the administration of medication: right dose, right patient, right medication, right frequency and right route (oral, intravenous, etc.). In addition, computer warnings appear for potential drug allergies, drug-drug interactions and food-drug interactions.
Milton Hospital, which is affiliated with Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, purchased the BMV system from its information technology vendor, Meditech. At an approximate cost of $116,000 for the necessary hardware and software, it was a substantial investment for a community hospital.
In addition, the implementation took six months,
and 400 nurses had to be trained to use the new system. But Raduazzo says the results are well worth the costs.
“It comes down to patient safety,” says Raduazzo.
In the six-month period following the implementation, the BMV system triggered 24 allergy warnings, 121 food-drug interaction warnings and 228
drug interaction warnings. In addition, the system provided information from laboratory tests that was pertinent to the administration of medication more than 24,000 times.
“It’s a very powerful system,” says Raduazzo.
Despite the BMV’s ability to warn of potential errors, it has been difficult to fully quantify the difference in the number of errors pre- and post-implementation. According to Raduazzo, errors were captured via a staff-generated incident report prior to BMV. Since many errors were near-misses—medications that weren’t given but which could have caused a problem if they were—they weren’t reported in many cases. Now, with every medication transaction being cleared through the system, virtually all errors, including near-misses, are being captured.
“You can’t hide from the system,” says Raduazzo.
Milton Hospital nurse Lynn Cronin, who also serves as the hospital’s director of infomatics, says that
BMV simplifies the process of giving patients their medication. “Anything I need to know is here,” she says. “All of this information I’ve never had before is at my fingertips.”