Understanding and reducing the medication delivery waste via systems mapping and analysis.

The enormous gaps in the knowledge required to understand medication errors and their related costs (or wastes) in all hospital settings have become a growing national concern. Such gaps are often the major reasons causing risk for patient safety and creating waste to the hospital. However, medication delivery system cannot be successfully improved and implemented without a clear understanding of various process flows running around the entire hospital system. This paper presents a systems mapping and analysis method to help understand and reduce the medication delivery waste. The effectiveness of our method is illustrated by a case study that we conducted for the medication delivery process at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, MT.