Better Meds and BD partner to advance medication management

Better Meds and BD have partnered to integrate BD’s automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs) with Better Meds’ electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system.

The partnership, in collaboration with University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust (UHP), aims to ensure safer and more efficient medication administration than manual processes on hospital wards.

By integrating the Better Meds ePMA with BD Pyxis ADCs, medication prescriptions will be automatically transmitted to the ADC system, reducing manual selection and ensuring a more patient-centric approach.

Božidarka Radović, product director at Better Meds, said: “At Better Meds, our mission is to make medication management safer for patients and more efficient for healthcare professionals.

“By integrating our ePMA system with BD Pyxis automated dispensing cabinets, we are reducing the manual steps involved in medication administration, giving nurses quicker and safer access to prescribed medications.

“This means fewer interruptions, reduced risk of selection errors, and more time for direct patient care.

“Our partnership with BD Pyxis is another step toward creating a seamless, interoperable medication management process that truly supports clinicians in their daily work.”

The integration will be implemented at UHP in the next few months to help improve controlled medication management within hospital wards.

Prescribers and pharmacists at UHP will continue their existing workflows in Better Meds, with all prescription updates automatically reflected in BD Pyxis ADCs.

Nurses and administrators are expected to benefit from a simpler medication retrieval process, which helps ensure greater accuracy and reduce the risk of missed or duplicate doses.

Nancy West, Northern Europe Hub director – medication management solutions at BD, said: “Our mission is to enable healthcare organisations to unlock efficiencies through streamlining Connected Medication Management (CMM) pathway – a technology-driven approach to automate, streamline and digitalise all steps of medication management in a healthcare setting.

“Through the close supplier collaboration between BD and Better Meds, we have achieved integration between the Better Meds ePMA system and the BD Pyxis Automated Dispensing Cabinets.

“The result is an end-to-end prescribing data flow from the ePMA to the dispensing cabinets.

“Unlocking data flows through successful interoperability between systems ensures seamless medication handling processes for the nursing staff, from patient-specific selection of medicines to assurance of maintaining medication safety to the point of medicine administration.

“This ensures the five rights of medicines administration: right person, right medicine, right dose, right route, right time.

“With patient safety as the core motivator for this type of integration between two technologies, we look forward to seeing the benefit gains for both patients and hospital staff at the University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust.”

In May 2025, Powys Teaching Health Board in Wales selected Better as its technology partner to deliver an ePMA system, as part of the national Digital Medicines programme, led by Digital Health and Care Wales and supported and funded by Welsh government.