Safeguarding Against Home Medication Errors

A new automated device, programmed by a pharmacist, can help patients avoid skipped doses, misinterpretation of labels, or confusion over what pills to take at what time.

The Medi-Sure dispensing system is about the size of a DVD player and is programmed by a pharmacist, who puts medications in cassettes that hold two weeks worth of medicine. The pharmacist also programs at what times each dose is to be taken and instructions for each medication, such as whether or not the medicine should be taken with food or water.

In the patient's home, the system alerts the patient that it is time to take their medicine through a verbal recording, and keeps alerting the patient until he or she presses the Get Dose button. The machine then dispenses the pills into a drawer that, once removed, tells the patient any specific instructions about that medicine. When the drawer is returned, the system records the time that the medicine was taken, and creates a log that can be accessed electronically by a healthcare provider and any family members who have been given permission to view the log. The log also includes crucial information about the medications, from the dosage to what the pills look like, since the generic version of a medicine can look completely different from the brand-name version.

"This was a device I made out of a desperate attempt to assist patients who ended up requiring emergency room treatment because of medication issues,” said the systems inventor Dr. Larry Shusterman, D.O., an internal medicine and geriatric physician and a former pharmacist, who is developing the product through his company, Rapid Patient Monitoring (Philadelphia, PA, USA). "I saw a lot of people who were in nursing homes because of medication issues. The usual methods of medicine reminders, like calendars, or pill boxes, just weren't working.”

The system is currently being used by the living independently for elders (LIFE) program at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA), and various locations in New Jersey (USA).


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University of Pennsylvania