Press Release: Smart Medicine Cabinets Free Nurses to Attend Their Patients’ Needs in the South-Karelian Central Hospital

The South-Karelian Central Hospital invests in two eMED ICON automated dispensing cabinets that NewIcon Oy, based in Kuopio, Finland, will deliver to the ICU and the intensive monitoring unit of the hospital in autumn 2017.

The new section of the hospital will be finished in 2018 and there are plans to equip it with up to seven smart medicine cabinets. In addition to making pharmaceutical services more efficient, the investment will also improve patient safety and help free the nurses’ time to better attend to their patients’ needs.

Reetta Junnola, Master of Science in Pharmacy, who works in the South-Karelian Central Hospital, says that the hospital pharmacy will take over the management of the medicine storage of the departments, which will save the nurses’ time for other tasks. Thanks to the smart medicine cabinet system, medicine orders, among other things, will be transmitted directly from the departments to the hospital pharmacy.

“In the future, the personnel of the hospital pharmacy will circulate more in the departments, which helps the pharmacy and departments deepen their co-operation. The nurses will of course have to learn to use the new software. However, the management of the selection of medicines and storage will be easier when the nurses will not be required to manage the list of medicines available at the department or handle expiring medicines. Smart medicine cabinets will also enable financial savings by reducing medicine waste,” Ms Junnola explains.

The deal also includes the integration of the smart medicine cabinets into the hospital’s patient information system, which means that each patient’s medication will be available directly in the smart medicine cabinets’ system. Ms Junnola says that the smart medicine cabinets represent an investment in the medical safety in the hospital by reducing the risk of human error in medicine distribution. In addition, all the transactions in the system are logged, which reduces the risk of medicine abuse.

The two smart medicine cabinets purchased this year will be placed in the ICU and the intensive monitoring unit without interrupting the normal operation of the units.

“Installing the new cabinets has to be planned, scheduled and organised carefully to make sure that the units can continue their operations during the installation. In the future, the acquisition of further smart medicine cabinets will be considered particularly in connection with the reorganisation of operations and when renewing the premises. We have not made any decisions yet, but we have considered automated solutions for the compounding of IV antibiotics and the storage of medicines in the hospital pharmacy,” Ms Junnola adds.