Unit and Dose Packaging Systems Analysis
Investigators: Profs. Russell D. Meller, Scott J. Mason and Sarah E. Root and Students Jen Pazour and Yasin Unlu
Opportunities For Impact: Medications are typically distributed by manufacturers in bulk, but to increase patient safety, they are often administered to inpatients in unit-doses and to outpatients in dose packs. The vast majority of unit-doses are created using a manual process. This juxtaposition of administering unit-doses to increase patient safety, but using an inherently unreliable manual process to create the unit-doses, leads to two related opportunities for research. The impact of successfully addressing these two opportunities will be both on patient safety and cost in a synergistic fashion.
Proposal: 1) Given that there are a variety of options, determine the most economical manner to repackage bulk medications to unit-doses; 2) Aid in the administration of medications, determine the limits of packaging common prescriptive protocols into compliance “dose packs.”
 |
 |
Expected Outcomes:
- A simple tool that can be used to determine when various repackaging alternatives are optimal for a given volume, mix, and other necessary factors.
- A simple tool for determining the cost implications of a move to dose pack delivery for a particular medication.
- An integrated decision-support tool for unit-dose medications.