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Barcode-assisted medication administration systems are integrated in hospital's electronic health record systems to promote safe and accurate medication administration. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to increase compliance with using barcode-assisted medication administration among nurses through educational interventions and mobile device optimization.
Key Words: Smartphone apps, barcode-assisted medication administration (BCMA), medication errors, medication safety, emergency department, nurses.
Nurses in emergency departments across the Unites States are facing challenges with high patient volumes, complex tasks, and higher acuities - all contributing to increasing threats to medication safety (van der Veen et al., 2017; Whalen et al., 2020). Nurses are responsible for administering medications and serve as the first line of defense in preventing medication errors (Sloss & Jones, 2020; van der Veen et al., 2017). In the emergency department, frontline nurses can administer more than 20 medications within a 12-hour shift (Sloss & Jones, 2020). Medication errors are the most common type of error in health care, contributing to an estimated 440,000 deaths annually, injuring approximately 1.3 million people, and is the third leading cause of death in the United States (Carver et al., 2020; Jones & Treiber, 2018). Most medication errors occur in fastpaced, short-stay, and acute care clinical areas such as the emergency department due to high patient turnover and frequent use of verbal orders (Cabilan et al., 2017). Other known contributing factors to medication errors include faulty systems - or processes - that either lead people to make medication errors or fail to prevent them (Carver et al., 2020). Medication errors can result from mistakes in prescribing, transcribing, and dispensing; however, an estimated 20-30% occur during the administration phase (Sloss & Jones, 2020).
Over the last 2 decades, hospitals have implemented information technology systems such as computerized physician order entry (CPOE) programs to reduce errors related to prescribing and transcription. Although use of CPOE has shown to reduce these mistakes, there were still risks with medication safety at the frontlines (van der Veen et al., 2018). Identified these gaps in medication safety served as an impetus for the development of technological innovations to improve medication safety for nurses at the final administration phase (Bates & Singh, 2018; van der Veen et al., 2018). To address these challenges, hospitals across the...