Electronic School Medication Administration Record (ESMAR) application development

Administering prescription medication to students is a daunting task. In most public-school systems, one school nurse is responsible for the entire student body. This is a significant responsibility for one individual to undertake especially when roughly 27% of the school age population take some form of prescription medication, and this number is growing year over year. Therefore, one nurse must actively track a considerable number of students who need to receive their prescriptions during school and monitor them to ensure that each student receives the correct dosage(s) at the proper times.

School nurses do not have access to computer-aided workflows for managing prescription monitoring. Most school nurses surveyed use pens and paper to keep records. More sophisticated teams utilize tools offered by their associated student record system (SRS), but often, these solutions are naïve adaptations of a simple spreadsheet. Therefore, current systems exist strictly for record-keeping rather than error prevention and detection. This is cause for concern because there is no system validating the accuracy of the administration of prescription drugs. Given the potential severity of such a mistake, common human errors must have redundant checks to minimize their occurrences.

This research explores the effectiveness of electronic school medication administration record-keeping software (ESMAR) developed to automate and aid in the nurse’s daily workflow. This system will actively remind, authenticate, and validate the administration of a prescription drug to a student. This minimizes the potential for incorrect dosage administration and ensures prescription drugs are administered to the correct student at the proper time. Similar systems are currently employed in other healthcare settings and have been proven to reduce medication errors.