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VERIeye Aids CMOP Prescription Identification

"As with any sophisticated automated system that aids decisionmaking, the results are only as good as the data given to the system, and VERIeye is unique in this aspect." - Michael Valentino, Chief Consultant, Pharmacy Benefits Management Strategic Healthcare Group Veterans Health Administration

Researchers with the Center for Manufacturing Research at Tennessee Tech University and TechWerks, a Tennessee-based technology company, have developed a machine to assist in the tedious job of prescription verification for the Veterans Health Administration's Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy (CMOP). The system, dubbed VERIEye, uses a camera to look into the bottle, a scale to weigh its contents and a computer to determine whether it's the right pill and in the correct amount. Until now, prescription verification has been relegated to pharmacy staff who are required to make decisions, based on examining the top contents of a prescription and comparing that to a picture of the expected medication. Not only is this ergonomically challenging, but the most difficult verification tasks (i.e. right quantity, detecting mixed fills, and detecting foreign objects below the top layer of pills) require a very well trained eye. The VERIeye system utilizes a patent pending system to "fuse" together a variety of information sources to recommend to the pharmacist whether to accept the prescription "as-is" or see if further inspection is required and why. VERIeye acceptance of the prescription is only recommended once it has been determined that the measured pill quantity (based on a scale reading accurate to + 1 mg) is within statistically acceptable ranges of the expected pill quantity. Next, the prescription must pass a visual examination where color is used as the primary discriminator to determine if it looks similar to previous images of the same pill. To enhance this step, the color analysis algorithm decomposes the image into smaller, equal-pixel segments to ensure that color abnormalities as a result of small foreign objects are accentuated rather than obfuscated by a larger number of pixels when considering the entire image.

Finally, if the prescription passes both weight and color, the prescription can be passed through a final filter that is based on measures of certainty about weight and color, with additional information about pill shape and printed labels. Because the tasks of weighing, imaging, and decision processing are all conducted simultaneously for different prescriptions, the resultant throughput of the system has been proven to average approximately 1.8 seconds per prescription. Determinations of pill color used in the image processing analysis are adaptively updated to take into account minor changes in manufacturers' colors and possible changes in the VERIeye system, such as slight color and intensity changes in the camera's light source. This adaptive nature is the prime enabler of easy enrollment of new pills to the system. Utilizing a user-friendly, on-line enrollment program, personnel with only minimal training are able to add a new pill within 10-15 minutes.