medications on the move everyday in Eastern Health hospitals there's a constant flow of medication from pharmacies to patient floors doctor's orders are prescribed received filled and dispensed to assist in patient recovery every day hundreds of patients thousands of medications and each one is vitally important to ensure that patients always get the right medication at the right time Eastern Health has introduced an automated medicine cabinet called pixs according to Dave Smith the pharmacist helping to implement the initiative pixs targets delays in the process and medications that weren't always close at hand when needed it electronically tracks inventory and this is a benefit when we're looking at narcotics and controlled substances and it also helps us to refill before things run out on the floor more commonly used medications are now stocked in the new cabinet for quick access versus the previous unit dose system of filling doctor's orders one prescription at a time and the new cabinet opened electronically by individual fingerprints also replaces the individual medication containers outside patient rooms it's reduced the time it takes to refill medication cassettes by 2 hours per day and requests for medications not immediately at hand have gone down a whopping forty nine percent frontline staff in both pharmacy and nursing collaborated to develop the Pyxis system which is more organized and more secure it has now been fully implemented at st. Clare's Mercy Hospital where Danielle Dinh is a nurse on unit five east she says the new system allows staff to manage their time more efficiently but the biggest benefit is to patients so the biggest improvement I have noticed probably is the amount of time that it takes until we actually have access to the medications to give it to the patients so with the old system the doctor would write the order we'd have to take the requisition Pharmacy would get it on the next round which could be an hour it would go to pharmacy then the prescription would have to be filled and actually come back to the floor before we'd have access to it now it at least cuts that time in half because the requisition goes to pharmacy and it just has to be keyed into the system as soon as that part is done we actually have access to it on the floor so it's available to give to the patient Pyxis also features a drug warning screen to alert nurses to any special instructions for administering certain drugs before they remove it from the cabinet Pyxis improves quality and safety for our patients Pyxis is interfaced with the Meditec computer system so any information pharmacy enters will appear on the Pyxis screen this ensures that patients will only get the medications that are prescribed today Pixis is both a simple solution and advanced technology requiring a multi-million dollar investment by Eastern Health it's currently being implemented at the Health Sciences Center before expansion to other Hospital sites in the region as part of ongoing process improvement as a division manager with an Eastern Health one of our responsibilities is to continuously monitor processes and look at ways we can improve them yet maintained high standards of care that we expect within Eastern Health pixs as a system that's designed just to do that it's actually made more nurses time more efficient enables the administration and delivery of medications in a timely fashion a goal that we can achieve now Pyxis proof that enhanced productivity and patient safety is possible one medication at a time