Evaluation of a Personal Digital Assistant Device Implementation for Barcode Medication Administration with Nurses Using a Likert Questionnaire.

DESCALZO, JUAN; CASTRO, JAVIER; SMITH, MARIA; LUNA, DANIEL R

Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

Ios Press

Año: 2022

1879-8365

The majority of preventable medication errors occur at the administrationstage. BCMA systems are used to improve safety and prevent errors in this stage. Avariety of devices can be used for this purpose. Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires isa high complexity medical center implementing a BCMA project since 2015. It iscurrently migrating to PDA devices for nurses. The objective of this work is toevaluate the implementation of these new devices in selected wards at HIBA usinga self-reported questionnaire. From 318 contacted nurses, 58 answered thequestionnaire (18.2% response rate). Overall, agreement was high among allstatements regarding the new devices. Nurses valued especially the increased safetyto reduce errors, improvements in previous hospital processes and achievingimprovements in the flow and quality of patient care. Nurses recommended the useof the device in their sector, with a mean score of 4.6/5 and 91.3% agreement,highest in total. This proved to be a cost-effective method of evaluation of the newlyimplemented devices and acceptance by nurses. Measures to incorporate theremaining nurses´ feedback should be considered.