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The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) announced today a free medication home delivery service in Dubai for patients that visit DHA hospitals and health facilities.
Patients that have a valid prescription from a DHA health facility and are Emiratis or have a valid ENAYA or SAADA health insurance programme, are eligible for this service. They can log onto the DHA website www.dha.gov.ae and request for the home delivery service. They need to provide a preferred date of delivery, last appointment details and customer information.
The delivery of medications to the doorstep of patients may help improve compliance as well.
HE Humaid Al Qutami, Director-General of the DHA said, “Patient centric care and patient convenience is an important priority at the DHA. Over the last few years, pharmaceutical services across the DHA has seen a shift towards smart technology and smart pharmacy. We aim to continue in that direction. Home-delivery of medications is a feature that will provide added comfort to patients, particularly those who require medicines on a regular basis to treat conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, the elderly and people of determination.”
Dr. Ali Al Sayed, Director of the Pharmaceutical Services Department at the Dubai Health Authority said: “We are proud to offer this service to our patients. We constantly aim to further improve patient experience and comfort, we now have five smart pharmacies that has helped not only patients but also has made the system more efficient and has helped pharmacists as well. The addition of the home-delivery service will help provide patients with added convenience.
Al Sayed joined the DHA pharmacy team to carry out DHA’s first home delivery medication service.
He provided an overview of the smart pharmacy services at the Authority.
DHA has five smart pharmacies –two in Rashid Hospital, one in Dubai Hospital, one in Latifa Hospital and one in Nadd Al Hamar primary health centre.
Al Sayed said, “The smart pharmacies dispense and prescribe medication through a unified barcoding system. The smart pharmacies are operated via a robot that can store up to 35,000 medicines, prepare 12 prescriptions in a minute and dispense 8,000 medicines in an hour.”
He said that as per 2017 statistics, 36 million items were barcoded and integrated within the SALAMA electronic medical record system, which resulted in zero dispensing errors in 2017 and 2018. These smart pharmacies reduced the waiting time to an average of 2.6 minutes, thus increasing the time allocated for explaining medication instruction to an average of 5.65 minutes. The smart pharmacies helped reduce the processing time from 22.5 minutes on average in 2016 to 7.9 minutes in 2018; the outpatient satisfaction rate increased from 69 per cent in 2016 to 94 percent in 2018. By implementing this initiative, DHA saved 3.48 million in 2 years, and pharmacists’ happiness increased from 73.5 per cent in 2016 to 85 percent in 2017. The system is fully integrated with SALAMA system. The DHA is the first government authority in the region to implement the SMART Barcoding system.
At the end of the launch ceremony, Al Qutami thanked Dr Mohamed Kouta, General Manager at City Pharmacy; Dr Atif Amer, CEO of Modern Pharmaceutical Company; Dr Azza El-Sueisssy, Executive Manager at Pharmatrade; Dr Stephan Stauffer, General Manager at Arabian Ethicals for their sponsorship and support towards the Dawaee initiative.
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