In the University of Tokyo Hospital, the reentry of data, the re-output of documents, the transfer of data by hand writing, etc. has to be routinely carried out in each department, because there is no compatibility in the related work between the systems and generated information.
In this study, we developed a medication management system to share drug-requesting information generated inside the hospital with medical wholesalers who introduced the Value Added Network (VAN) -ordering system, and evaluated the usefulness of this system by sending questionnaires to those who are working in the wholesale, clinical wards, and office work sections.
The developed medication management system unified a series of information on the request-to-order processing of medicine between the hospital and wholesalers, the warehousing processing in the pharmacy department, the supply processing for the clinical wards, and the expenditure processing of purchased medical supplies. In addition, the system was designed to work with the LAN of our hospital information system under the environment of Windows NT®.
In the investigation on the introduction situation of the computer for the drug wholesalers, 14 out of 16 companies (88%) introduced a computerized system to receive orders. Moreover, 12 out of 14 companies (86%) replied with “it is useful” regarding the usefulness of the system. On the other hand, in clinical wards, 41 out of 55 (75%) replied with “the requesting process has become more convenient by using this system”. In office sections, the time needed to process orders was drastically shortened from approximately 20 to 5 minutes on average.
By utilizing this newly developed medication management system, it became possible to share the drug-requesting information originally generated in the clinical wards with the pharmacy department and office work section in the hospital and the medical wholesalers ; therefore, we find this system to be a useful supporting system for the proper management not only for hospitals but for medical wholesalers as well.
