“Aggregated Codes” how can they help wastage?
Community pharmacies, at the time of dispensing , must verify the safety features and decommission the “UI” of the medicinal products they dispense and decommission the medicinal products as they hand them to the patient. This can lead to delays in the pharmacy and also wastage if the patient does not require all their medicines or their medicines have recently been changed. In addition if there has been a delay of more than ten days since the medicines were dispensed and they have been decommissioned at the point of dispensing and they are not required the medicine cannot be place back into stock nor ” Re-commissioned ” resulting in wastage of medicines.
One way of helping to reduce wastage and time where more than one product is prescribed for a patient, is for pharmacy IT systems to aggregate the medicine pack barcodes onto the pharmacy bag label. The bar code can be linear or a “2D” barcode and the aggregates code can be scanned at the time of handing the medicines to the patient to decommissioned all the prescribed medicines with one scan thus saving time and saving the patient waiting longer than is necessary. In addition, any unwanted items can be returned to stock at this point saving wastage.