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TopIntroduction
Thanks to years of advances in medical and pharmaceutical technologies, more and more drugs can cure or control previously fatal diseases and help people live actively for decades longer. The benefits of the drugs would be even more wondrous were it not for the high rate of preventable medication errors (Veacez, 2006; Lisby et al., 2005; Law et al., 2003; Wertheimer, 2003). Medication errors are known to occur throughout the medication use process of ordering, transcription, dispensing, and administration. They lead to many hundred thousands of serious adverse drug events, thousands of deaths and billions of Euros in hospital cost each year. These alarming statistics have motivated numerous efforts in research, development and deployment of information technology systems and tools for prevention of medication errors (Kuperman et al., 2007; Baron et al., 2005).
iMedPlus aims to develop a medication adherence monitoring system, comprising of a portable medication dispenser with communication capabilities and a software platform allowing monitoring by medical personnel and/or carer. The patient data recorded by the dispenser (rate of medication intake) will be collected and will be transmitted in real-time to the hospital (via any Internet) link), where it will be analyzed and any alerts will be raised.
This will enable the doctors to:
On the other hand, it will also enable the carer to:
iMedPlus addresses the needs of patients with chronic illnesses that require encouragement and supervision with their medication. Monitoring is achieved through the use of a medication dispenser, which collects information about the patients’ medication adherence. The dispenser will contain electronics that record automatically the time and date the dispenser is accessed. These data will be transmitted via an Internet connection to the clinical team base.
TopMethodology
In order to acquire the most of our system, the proposed solution of iMedPlus will consist of four basic components: