Wolters Kluwer adds medication tray management solution to Simplifi+ Compliance Suite

Simplifi+ MedTrays automates and standardizes emergency cart medication tray management to ensure accuracy, optimize utilization of short-dated drugs, and support patient safety.

To support more accurate, consistent and safe emergency cart restocking and medication tray management, Wolters Kluwer, Health has launched Simplifi+® MedTrays. Part of Simplifi+®, a comprehensive suite of pharmacy compliance solutions, Simplifi+ MedTrays helps ensure medication trays are stocked according to policy, optimizes medication inventory, and manages tray verification to comply with medication management requirements. The solution supports more consistent safety checks and improved efficiency enterprise-wide while reducing the burden on pharmacy departments.

Improving patient safety with standardization

Crash carts are essential in ensuring rapid response during a patient emergency on nursing units, in the emergency room and the surgical suite. That’s why it’s important that the expected medications are in the right location, are not expired, and the tray is restocked quickly. Without a management system, replenishing and removing expired medications is managed through manual systems and pharmacist visual checks, creating inconsistency, and increasing the potential for error.

Simplifi+ MedTrays uses barcode scanning to ensure medication trays are always restocked with the right drugs in the right doses in the right place. Electronic capture of lot and expiration dates dramatically reduces the time spent finding and redeploying medications that will soon expire, and removing recalled medications. By standardizing restocking workflows, Simplifi+ MedTrays drives operational efficiency and reduces variation while maintaining flexibility to adapt to the changing supply chain and supporting improved patient safety.

Optimizing inventory management with data analytics

With crash cart medication trays being used at different intervals across the hospital, the pharmacy is responsible for tracking drug utilization. However, it’s complicated to manage since disruption in the drug supply chain often creates the need to substitute specific drugs in a tray for an equivalent option. Drug recalls further complicate inventory management with unplanned urgent restocking needs that are difficult to manage with paper-based systems. Simplifi+ MedTrays offers critical visibility, efficiency, and oversight that organizations need to navigate this complexity.

Simplifi+ MedTrays also delivers actionable reports that enable a proactive approach to medication management. Analytics can reveal, for example, which units have drugs nearing expiration or turn trays over more quickly – and which turn over less – so hospital staff can prioritize restocking based on real utilization.

More than 2,400 hospitals are using Simplifi+ solutions including Simplifi 797 and Simplifi+ MedStorage to automate, streamline and improve competencies in how medications are compounded and stored to keep patients and hospital staff safe.