Medication Dispensing System

New York-Presbyterian (NYP) Hospital is a university hospital in New York City. NYP’s nursing leadership and key stakeholders recognize the importance of providing efficient, safe, and cost effective methods of delivering medications from the point of pharmacy dispensing to the point of administering them to patients at their bedside. Desiring further improvements in its medication dispensing process, NYP sought to identify best practices and models that could facilitate improvement. NYP engaged a Capstone team to determine best practices of medication dispensing. The team described the necessary steps of a medication dispensing system that can assist in delivering medication at bedside, and defined measurement processes to evaluate the impact of these recommended improvement strategies. The team examined the strengths and weaknesses of the current system, defined potential improvements that could be implemented to justify moving forward with the current system, and assessed the cost/benefit of full replacement of the existing medication distribution system.