Narcotics Dispensing Cabinet Tutorial – Clinical staff

Watch the Narcotics Cabinet‘s new tutorial video to learn how physicians and anesthesiologists can easily and securely access narcotic drugs and controlled substances in the operating room. IDENTI’s automated dispensing cabinet allows fast access to drugs while giving the hospital’s pharmacy full control over what medications have been removed, by whom, and to which patient. With advanced facial recognition technology, 67 personal returns cells and a full sync at the hospital’s internal systems – IDENTI’s management system is the perfect solution!

Let’s speak about the Secured Narcotics Dispensing Cabinet.

As you can see, this machine is safe to store controlled medications and narcotics, and it has two different safety mechanisms to ensure that it is secure. You have either to enter with facial recognition technology. We have here the camera, or you could use a fingerprint recognition technology, which would then define for each user to enter into the system. Two different uses can access the machine. We have doctors and pharmacists.

Now I’m going to show you how quick and easy it is to go into the system as a doctor. Simply click on the press to stop and stand in front of the machine, and within seconds it is identified me using my facial recognition technology that it has. There are different possibilities that the doctor can do on this machine. We have to “Take”, “Return” and “Waste”.

• “Take” is to remove medication out of the drawer.
• “Return” is to return any whole vials or ampules that were not used during surgery or procedure.
• “Waste” is to just report on any medication if a vial was broken or not completely used and not finished in surgery.

The first thing that I’ll show you is the “Take”…

You simply click here, and it opens up onto the screen. What is important about this is that there is no need for the doctor to search for the patient in the system. All they can do is take the patient’s barcode. Our machine syncs up to the hospital’s internal system so that only patients that are in the system, their barcode will be recognized, scanned in the barcode reader, and it opens up to the list of medications that the doctor can remove from the cabinet. The first thing you do, you select the medications that you’d like you can select from this list here, and you click “Approve”. The next thing that will do, on the screen, it will show, it will flash which drawer needs to open, as well as flash on the drawer here as well. Pull over the drawer, and as you can see, the two cells open up on the screen, you can see as well which cells were removed. As you can see, it is very difficult to open the cells by force. Only the cells that were requested to be opened can be opened. Once done, close the drawer.

The next activity they can do is “Return”…

“Return” is the option to only return whole vials to the system if they were not used. The way that it is done, the doctor can either very conveniently select the patient list here. And it will only show patients that they have used, taken medication previously. It will not show an entire list of patients. Or once again, you can use the barcode of the patient to scan it in the system. One scan, a list will open up of the medications removed for that patient. The doctor then selects the amount that they need to return. And as you can see, the bottom drawer will flash, which is the returns drop. And over here, the light will flash on the drawer as well. Simply open the door, and once again, only the cell that is for the returns is open. And again, none of the cells were open up here without permission, except for the necessary one. The doctor will then return the medications to the cell, and when they are all done close the drawer. What is very good about our machine and what makes it very secure and safe is that it can hold every person accountable for their actions in this machine. It records which doctor has removed medications where they’re placed and what they have returned to the system. A pharmacist can then afterward when they come to remove the returns drawer and empty it, validate that what the doctors have written is correct. They see the details of the patient, the doctor, and the medication that is supposed to be returned, as well as there, are a whole bunch of handy reports that we have in our platform that shows and manages the different medications that were removed and returned in the drawer.

One final activity that the doctor can do reports “Waste” on medication…

Once again, select to report a broken vial or by the exact milligrams of what you need to report. And then “Approve”. This is only a place to report this information, the waste does not occur in our machine. And it is to keep track of any medication if a vial was broken or medication was not fully consumed during a surgery or procedure and the doctor will just report it. As you can see, the machine also has a timeout. If the doctor does not press any sort of buttons on the machine after a certain amount of time, it will log out the doctor to prevent anyone from accessing the machine in the doctor’s name.

This was our Secure Narcotics Cabinet, thank you for listening. And of course, if you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team!

If you are looking for a better, safer, more secure and accountable way to manage decentralized dispensing in your hospital or ambulatory care facility, contact us to discuss how our system can support you.