iFORMation™ – LTC Pharmacy

The History of iFORMation™ LTC Pharmacy

In 2004, InfoMax introduced a customized digital pen and paper ordering system that improves the way resident (patient) prescriptions are recorded and filled in Long Term Care facilities and pharmacies. The application, allows doctors to fill out prescription forms for each resident visited in the facility, using Anoto Digital Pen and Paper technology (DP&P). The result is that prescriptions are delivered faster and more accurately, improving the quality of care and keeping a precise record of all medications prescribed. Full deployment of the application began in February 2006 and thousands of digital pens are installed at numerous Long Term Care facilities.

Since then, a new LTC Pharmacy module was developed on our next generation iFORMation™ platform to become the iFORMation™ LTC Pharmacy solution.

Background of Pharmacy Prescribing in LTC Facilities

Residents in long-term care facilities are visited regularly by doctors, who assess their condition and adjust their medications or prescribe new medications according to need. Until recently, these prescriptions were generally written out by doctors with regular pen and paper and had to be collected and collated by nurses, sometimes taking hours of work. The nursing staff then faxed these prescriptions to the pharmacy manually, which also took considerable time and sometimes caused delays in medication delivery processing and delivery of the medications from the pharmacy side. After faxing them, all these prescriptions had to be sorted and inserted into resident charts again, thereby increasing the likelihood of error or misplacement.

Because doctors’ rounds in a long-term care facility involve many residents and therefore many prescriptions have to be handled over a short period of time, there was often a back log and, consequently, a delay before all prescriptions were sent off to the pharmacy.

This could mean a long wait for residents in need of medication, while also increasing the risk of errors in data transmission between the long-term care facility and the pharmacy, as well as possible inaccuracies in the prescription records for each resident.

On the other hand, doctors were accustomed to using traditional pen and paper to write prescriptions, finding it easy to fill out forms during their rounds of the wards. Nursing staff were also familiar with the paper forms, which provided a written trace of medications prescribed, to be kept on record.