Hospital Authority
Developing smart pharmacy is one of the most important components toward sustainable healthcare under Hospital Authority Strategic Plan for 2022-2027. However, the drug dispensing practice in Hong Kong adopt open-shelf storage with loose package dispensing unit to single pill. As a result, in Hong Kong, it still relies on pharmacists’ expertise for drug collection and dispensing and it is difficult to apply digital solutions such as automation and robotics to offload the manpower, enhance the accuracy and efficiency. The unavoidable human error for wrong drug or quantity dispensing may cause death or permanent harm to the patients. It is reported that the average number of medication error in the past 10 years is 75.8 cases per year in Hong Kong public hospitals, 17.6% are related to dispensing error. Moreover, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has greatly increased the burden on an already overloaded public pharmacy system to a next level. The high pressure and huge workload have brought unpredictable challenges to the pharmacy system and the communities. In this project, we will develop a novel and effective sensing fusion platform for drug type and quantity monitoring during drug uploading and dispensing process. The platform consists of three parts: 1. Customized designed Head-Mount Display (HMD) with sensing to facilitate pharmacists’ daily operation through drug sensing and indication triggering. 2. Vision-based edge computing system to monitor the drug quantity and type on the drug shelf in real time. 3. An integrated cloud-based control system to overall consolidate data and regulate interaction among pharmacists, HMD and edge computing system. Such sensing fusion platform is able to perform real time drug type and quantity monitoring and prevent the dispensing error to the greatest extend possible. Meanwhile, by adopting such platform, the existing dispensing practice performs in the public pharmacy department can be maintained: the existing drug shelf structure and the pharmacists’ operation procedure can be kept unchanged, moreover, both of the accuracy and efficiency of the pharmacy operation can be highly enhanced. Together with the public pharmacy department’s great support, we are able to tackle the existing challenges and provide high quality healthcare services to the people of Hong Kong in the coming years and beyond.