National Home Care Agency Takes Revolutionary Step to Reduce Medication Errors

Right at Home ® Partners with AccuPax®  to Fight Leading Cause of Preventable Death among Seniors

Right at Home announces a breakthrough measure that could save the lives of thousands of seniors who are hospitalized or die each year as a result of medication errors.  According to the Health Care Compliance Packaging Council, medication errors account for more than 125,000 deaths annually. 

Now, for the first time in the in-home care industry, Right at Home has teamed up with AccuPax, a leading medication packaging delivery and monitoring service, to provide seniors with a simple system to accurately track their daily medication doses directly in their homes.

“Any family caring for a frail elderly or disabled loved one is concerned about medication management,” said Allen Hager, president and founder of Right at Home. “It’s such a terrible irony that the same medication intended to save their lives often ends up causing them more harm. By partnering with AccuPax, we can eliminate this fear and reduce the stress and worry for the families and caregivers of thousands of seniors throughout the country."

While medication tracking systems have long been readily available at retail outlets, this partnership for the first time brings the systems directly to seniors along with somebody trained to educate them on how to use the system.

“Our partnership was created to bring together two important puzzle pieces—we had the product, and Right at Home has direct access to the people who need it most,” said Ron Kutrieb, president of AccuPax, Inc. “So why not come together to create the perfect solution?”

Already, the partnership has been tested in 24 markets around the country.  In one test market, Terri Fenno, owner of the Right at Home office in Cincinnati, Ohio, experienced an immediate impact in the lives of her clients and her own.

Fenno was working with an elderly married couple—the husband suffered from a stroke and the wife was experiencing the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Right at Home had been hired by the couple’s son to assist with the simple housework, meal preparation, and medication reminders. One day, as the caregiver was leaving their residence, she noticed that the mother was double dosing the father. Fenno then suggested AccuPax to the couple’s son to avoid any further errors and to provide his parents with accuracy, convenience, and reduced expense in taking medication.

“Taking medication becomes so routine that usually you end up forgetting that you took it in the first place,” said Fenno. “We are offering our clients a product to relieve the doubt and to create a stress-free environment for everyone involved.”

AccuPax’s special packaging includes daily doses of medications that are in a continuous strip of packets containing a thirty-day supply of all of the prescriptions. The strip is placed in a specially designed container for dispensing. The pills are grouped by date and time they should be taken, with the assigned dosing time on the packet. This will prevent confusion about when to take the next dose. For example, if a patient has three prescriptions and needs to take all three prescriptions at the same time, a single packet will contain the proper dosage of all three prescriptions with the appropriate date and time of administration printed on the packet. There is no confusion about when a medication should be taken and the chances of missing a dosing event are greatly reduced.

For Right at Home clients, caregivers will be present to bring it to their client’s attention and walk them through the process, but it is also available to the general public. Consumers can call 888-600-9692 or visit the AccuPax web site at www.accupax.net.

Right at Home is a national organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for those we serve. We fulfill that mission through a dedicated network of locally owned, franchised providers of in-home care and assistance services.