Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital | Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Prescriptive Security for Prescription Delivery
See how this innovative hospital utilized technology to deliver the highest level of care for its patients and accountability for its staff.
Around the Clock Access
When an illness or injury escalates to the level of requiring a hospital stay, it is vital that you receive the care necessary to get on the mend as soon as possible. For the hospital hosting your stay, this means the correct staff members to get from diagnosis to discharge must be on-site.
While ideal in theory, increased staffing concerns and budget monitoring led an East Montreal hospital to seek out an alternative that could streamline the required number of staff members and boost accuracy and accountability in the delivery of medications.
The main concern for the hospital was in the role played by their pharmacy in the treatment of patients. In order to ensure the right diagnosis is paired with the right medicine and distribution method and timing, a pharmacist must oversee and approve the process, which meant they would need to be on-site 24/7. Knowing this would incur a significant cost for the facility, they reached out to their Spacesaver consultant and our more than 50 years of designing and delivering high-quality systems to provide a cost-effective solution that offered security and accountability.
"We needed a system that could improve upon the time it takes to deliver drugs to the patients, while increasing the security and tracking of the medication and who administers it."
- Hospital Worker
Healthcare Storage Guide
Healthcare Storage Guide
Supporting A Comprehensive Diagnosis
Our consultant knew that when dealing with something as delicate as the health of another person, no decision can be made in haste. And, as this project centered around a public hospital who would be required to put the work out for bid, they needed to take potential competition into consideration. Much like the process to determine the cause of an illness, they completed a thorough workup of the hospital’s functionality in order to provide a detailed recommendation for the best possible solution.
With this knowledge at-hand and a history of delivering high-quality results, our consultant was able to partner with the project’s architect early in the A&D process to provide valuable insight that helped shape the necessary project specifications. Insight, which allowed them to win the project after about a year and a half of evaluation by the hospital’s administrators and advisors.
An Impact Beyond the Shift
A must-have feature for the hospital was that the system could function seamlessly outside the assigned hours of the hospital’s pharmacists. Upon taking stock of the individuals involved in the process, their roles, and how their efforts combined to serve their patients, we found that with the right storage solutions in place, pharmacists could work their assigned shift and, before leaving for the day, assess and allocate necessary medicines for distribution by staff while they are off the clock. Let’s take a look at each of those systems and the role they play in this installation:
Pass-Thru Lockers
These wall-integrated, two-sided systems are ideal for upholding the integrity of the materials that pass through them. On one side, pharmacists utilize secure doors to access the compartments of each individual locker whose respective doors can be opened by staff on the other side. This allows them to allocate and store the appropriate medication for a specific patient, holding it safely until the assigned staff member enters their unique code to retrieve it.
ControLoc® Technology
Spacesaver’s ControLoc® digital locking mechanism offers a great way to create, recognize, and track staff member access. In this instance, ControLoc documents which individuals have accessed the system, the lockers they entered, and the date and time of each entry. As such, hospital administrators knew where each medication was located at any given time and who was responsible for them.
Saving Time, Resources, and Lives
One custom feature the hospital required of our team and solutions was for the system to allow for access to multiple doors with a single login sequence. With prior systems, users would have to enter their login information for each individual locker door, causing an unnecessary amount of time to complete the task or multiple trips.
"Spacesaver was able to adapt the system to meet our requirement to have the doors opening sequentially using our existing RFID cards. “The custom ControLoc system has reduced the number of staff needed for each shift, improving efficiency and helping our bottom line."
- Hospital Administrator
When using our custom system, staff members enter their credentials and each door they have been assigned access to lights up. Then, starting with the lowest numbered door, each will and unlock and blink to indicate its contents are ready for retrieval. Once one door is opened and closed, it will automatically lock, and the next door will open. Each event is recorded in the audit log, and the process continues until all assigned doors have been accessed.
With these innovative solutions in place, administrators and staff were able to improve their processes and automate functions that once required an on-site presence to fulfill. This has led to increased savings in both time and budget, while at the same time allowing the hospital to have a stronger understanding of who is handling and administering these high-value narcotics and drugs at all times.
