PharmaHosp for the e-prescribing management in the hospital environment

Managing pharmaceutical products is a sensitive topic for healthcare providers. From production to administering, the item’s life cycle is threatened by human errors and frauds. Health ministry’s effort concentrates in achieving a reliable control over this process by monitoring production, tracing logistic, obtaining data about usage and providing withdrawal guidelines. In 2004, the Italian government approved a law enabling this control. The decree only delineates handling outside healthcare structures, not inside them. PharmaHosp main purpose is to achieve the same control inside healthcare providers. The result relies on searching successfully among pharmaceutical data, tracing movements through operational units, providing interfacing and integration for the administrative and the prescribing worlds. Structuring the pharmaceutical domain emphasized the issue of querying data derived from heterogeneous sources. Observing ontologies, as Rx-Norm, provided an idea of the core attributes and entities of a drug and the resulting decision to implement a search procedure capable of weighting terms. In time, these weights will be tuned with respect to the history of searches. PharmaHosp speaks the language of the management and of the prescriber; hence, it provides an interface that works by codes and commercial names and by active ingredients and dosages. Traceability is defined as recording every movement in the domain and finding products by means of batch and expiration date. Labeling items with unique identifiers and using barcode readers reduced human errors and introduced a reliable monitoring. Being part of wHospital™ Framework, a healthcare software developed 7 by Laserbiomed™, PhamaHosp objective of integration lies in communicating with therapy’s modules, with administrative modules and eventually external software. PharmaHosp is configurable for two types of providers: PharmaHospital adopts a hospital-like logic while PharmaHospice tunes its behavior for homecare scenarios, which are in mobility and involve a stricter user to products relation. Three healthcare providers are actually beginning trials of the latest release of PharmaHosp.