Delivering the Future of Medication Management

Friday 7th June 2019, at Clinical Pharmacy Congress, Omnicell UK, the world-leading provider of automated healthcare and medication adherence solutions launched its vision for the Autonomous Pharmacy; the future of digital medication management.

The Autonomous Pharmacy will help combat the challenges pharmacists and healthcare practitioners face everyday while trying to deliver quality patient care.  In recent years, additional administrative tasks and pressures have grown exponentially whilst the number of pharmacists and support staff has stagnated.  This coupled with an ageing population on even more complex medication regimes has created a perfect storm.

Omnicell’s vision will free pharmacists from mundane administrative responsibilities to spend more time on what matters most – spending face to face time with their patients. Within hospitals, care homes and for use at home, medications will be sorted, picked, labelled and reconciled at every point of use. This will all be powered by a connected pharmacy cloud infrastructure to transform the healthcare environment and provide real-time data insights and predictive analytics.

The vision is for every dose of medication, regardless of form, to include contextual data about the patient, inventory, utilisation, prescribing healthcare professional and more.  This will be saved to ‘the pharmacy cloud network’. Healthcare professionals will be able to use the automated network to ensure the right dose of medication is given to the right patient at the right time.

The Autonomous Pharmacy encompasses the cloud platform, workflow automation products, data intelligence solutions and expert support services. It will deliver reduced operational costs, dramatically improve patient safety and result in greater efficiency and total compliance in critical areas of organisations. The three key areas of focus include;

• Automation; solutions designed to digitise and streamline workflows
• Intelligence; insights to better understand medication usage and improve pharmacy supply chain management
• Work; expert services that serve as an extension to pharmacy solutions to support improved efficiency, regulatory compliance and patient outcomes.

The vision comes in the wake of a report by the Department of Health and Social Care last year which disclosed that in England 237 million mistakes occur every year at some point in the medication process1.  These errors cause serious issues for patient safety, but also place a significant cost burden on an already stretched NHS. The estimated costs to the NHS of avoidable adverse drug reactions is £98.5 million per year, consuming 181,626 bed days, causing 712 deaths and contributing to 1,078 deaths.

Paul O’Hanlon, Managing Director of Omnicell UK & Ireland adds; “Technology plays a pivotal role in reducing medication errors and improving patient safety. Here at Omnicell we are committed to the ongoing development our solutions to ensure our customers are always at the forefront of patient safety, clinical governance and stock management. Our vision of the Autonomous Pharmacy pushes the boundaries of innovation within the field of digital healthcare solutions – ensuring pharmacists will be able to spend time on what they were trained for and what matters most – spending time with their patients.”

For more information, please contact Jo Gulliver or Niamh Donnelly at Trinity PR on telephone: 020 7112 4905/ 0770 9487961 or email: jo.gulliver@trinitypr.co.uk