Abstract
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare promotes the use of the new bar code to ensure the traceability of pharmaceuticals and to prevent their drug-dispensing errors. This study was conducted to investigate what problems need to be resolved to realize the traceability of pharmaceuticals using the new bar code in health insurance pharmacies, and furthermore, how the new bar code might be effective in preventing the drug-dispensing errors, etc. While various tasks that needed to be resolved were identified, such as the addition of systems and modification of existing system functions, for realizing the traceability of pharmaceuticals in our health insurance pharmacy, we could construct an information management system that can trace each manufacturing number or code of prescription drugs to end consumers, i.e., patients. In addition, this new system reduced the monthly number of incident reports, such as the drug-dispensing errors, from 20.3 to 0.6 and was suggested to be effective in improving operations in health insurance pharmacies. The realization of pharmaceutical traceability makes it possible to provide safety information to end consumers, i.e., patients, as soon as drug-dispensing errors are found, and is expected to greatly contribute to the prevention of medical malpractice.
