It’s been an exciting week for the Epic Digital team as we unveiled our new Medication Manager product to a group of industry colleagues.
We established Epic Digital late last year as a specialist business focused on delivering technology solutions that connect healthcare professionals with each other and their patients, with a goal of improving access to information and empowering patients in the management of their health. To date most of our product output has been around internal Epic Pharmacy projects to allow our people to readily gather and access information at the points that its needed, but in the background the team have been working hard with our Israeli tech partner on our external facing products.
The first of these is Medication Manager, which is designed to allow patients and health care professionals real time time access to pharmacy information, including medication profiles. In our aged care business the Epic Pharmacy medication chart product has provided our residential care facilities with real time access to medication profiles for many many years, but to meet the expectations of Australia’s ageing population this information needs to be available to anyone, regardless of where they live.
It’s long been recognised that access to a patient’s current medication profile is of great benefit in healthcare service delivery. A medication profile is completely different to a list of prescribed or dispensed medications, as these don’t necessarily reflect what the person is actually taking each day, and at what time. We’ve long been frustrated by the lack of access to this kind of information in our own treatment settings, and with the current proposed Australian electronic health record not providing any solution in the short to medium term we decided to do something about it.
Medication Manager has a multi-tiered permission structure, allowing access by patients, family members, care givers, health care providers, and third parties – all controlled by who the patient wishes to share this information with. It has the capability to take information in from an endless array of enterprise systems, and can share information back into health provider systems in a manner that integrates into their workflows – all delivered under world leading security protocols.
As well as opening up the door on access to medication information, Medication Manager has a built in, fully customisable adherence tool which supports a wide range of scenarios ranging from patients who fully self manage their medicines, those who manage with support from family right through to those who access funded home care service packages through care organisations.
‘ Medication due’ alerts not only prompt patients but can provide an early warning system to care givers, raising the alarm that a medication has been missed and triggering a call or visit to check the person is ok. For organisations delivering home care services, all of the adherence information relating to the patients under their care is readily available and prioritised in dashboard displays.
Medication Manager is just the first in a range of products designed to ensure we are ready for the future of healthcare, where input from a range of sources including monitors and sensors combines with medication information from the pharmacy to allow real time decision making by the patient and their healthcare team.
Technology has placed consumers in the driver seat in nearly every other aspect of their lives, and healthcare is no different.
It’s an exciting time to be in our industry, and at Epic we intend to be part of driving that pace of change!
Sounds like an amazing system 🙂
Its had great people working on it!