Pharmacy Daily | Barcode scanning concern

A brisbane community pharmacist has raised concerns about the barcode scan rates recorded in a widely used community pharmacy dispensing software, urging the Pharmacy Board of Australia to act to improve medication safety.

Mike Kaluschke from Red Hill Day and Night Pharmacy in Brisbane has written to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, the Pharmacy Guild and the PSA about the issue, highlighting his worry about the platform.

He said the scanning feature provided by the software in question "does not go far enough in protecting health outcomes for my patients," because it does not provide the ability to track the activity of individual dispensers.

While the system allows a pharmacist to match a scanned barcode printed on the prescription label of a dispensed medication with the barcode on the product itself, Kaluschke said there was no way to ensure pharmacists and interns were actually using the scanning process all the time.

"There is no reporting function to provide the percentage of prescriptions scanned by the individual user, be it pharmacist, intern or pharmacy student.

"If I have a newly employed intern I would like to know that all prescriptions are indeed scanned by that person," he wrote.

With the particular software he's concerned about, the scan rate can only be provided for all users combined, not individually, and to further confuse the issue it is possible to have a scan rate of more than 100%, as every pack is scanned for prescriptions of multiple packs (up to six) with a single dispensing recorded.

Kaluschke noted that an alternative software platform that he uses in another pharmacy allows him to see exactly who is scanning all the time and who is not, allowing the proprietor to encourage those who are slipping behind in scanning rates to improve their performance.

Kaluschke highlighted the recent PDL Practice Alert (PD 05 Nov) which detailed the experience of a pharmacist in relation to an AHPRA notification after a dispensing issue that could have been avoided by more diligent scanning practice - particularly in relation to LASA (look alike sound-alike) medications.