FarmaTools, DOMINION’s comprehensive management tool for hospital pharmacy, develops a safe manufacturing system in collaboration with La Mancha-Centro’s general hospital Pharmacy and IT Services specialized in high toxicity medicaments for oncology, haematology and other pathologies.
FarmaTools is a comprehensive management tool for hospital pharmacy that facilitates the management of the pharmacy needs, helps in the decision making and improves the safety in the medicaments use. This way it provides high level clinical tools to control the medicaments use and facilitates the storehouse management, prescriptions, mixture production, cytostatics and other pharmacy circuits. Not for nothing and as an example of this tool’s success, nowadays, around 80 percent of the Spanish National Health System hospitals trust in FarmaTools, and with this new phase of development, the software grows in its way to become a zero-error safety tool in medication.
Among other benefits that the use of FarmaTools provides we can find the following: medicaments and costs related problems reduction (2,3M€ annual saving per hospital, as each adverse event increases the average cost per stay in 3,700€); improvement of the prescription, surveillance and alerts management (5 percent costs reduction derivatives of the improvement of the doctor-pharmacist communication); optimization of the purchase management reducing a 10 percent the costs); optimization of the pharmacy storehouse management (lost by expiration date reduced to 0 and 20 percent reduction in fixed assets in the pharmacy warehouse); and finally, administrative cost reduction (30 percent time saving in management and administrative processes).
A great progress for the tool
If the software facilitated some practical improvements for the hospital pharmacy, the system has reached a new success level thanks to the latest development on safe manufacturing specialized in high toxicity oncology related medicaments, haematology and other pathologies. By means of this system some improvements have been implemented, such as voice communication, that allows to control the situation without polluting the environment by using a keyboard, so total sterility can be kept in the laminar flow stalls where this medication is produced.
Besides, the system analyses by a gravimetric control in each step of the process the result of the production after each reconstitution process or elements addition to the mixture of the produced medicament.
“Once the product has been produced and each raw material identifying sets have been determined, the system details and labels the final product associating it to the patient for whom the product has been made, with the exact dose that his or her pathology needs”
José Antonio García
| FarmaTools Product Manager
Thanks to this system it’s possible to eliminate the manufacturing problems in an environment where the new products element characteristics have a high level of toxicity that requires a maximum control and safety.
The improvements in use
This new system implementation has taken place in the La Mancha Centro General Hospital, managed by the Castilla-La Mancha Health Service (Sescam) and located in Alcázar de San Juan; with 339 beds, the centre has high tech equipment and a great diversity of medical services.
In the manufacturing and implementation process they had the objective of adding production, traceability and safe administration tools in all hospital’s processes. After finishing the implementation, the launch took place in the second semester of 2017 with great success, because it was built on C++ language and it adds a voice communication engine, as well as high precision scales communication tools.
For DOMINION, this project provides the necessary solutions in order to fight against medication errors that take place in hospitals. “The system will be a salutary lesson in the production of this type of products, adding safety to the onco-haematological treatments production basically”, highlights José Antonio.
