Support

The main purpose of QUMulus^® is to support accredited consultant pharmacists who hold QUM contracts with residential care facilities.

QUM stands for Quality Use of Medicines.

The name comes from “QUM” and a play on “cumulus” because the data for QUMulus^® is all in the cloud.

There are many advantages to keeping all the data in the cloud:

• patients’ personal and medical data is highly sensitive; the cloud is highly secure – more so than, say, a laptop computer that might be lost or accessed by someone who is not an authorised QUMulus^® user
• if your computer is lost or fails, your QUMulus^® data remains safe and uncompromised
• it is the use of a cloud database that makes data sharing possible, which is how QUMulus^® is able to provide comparative analyses of medication usage between multiple residential care facilities and even across whole corporate groups and states/territories; it also enables a Business Unit to have more than a single pharmacist accessing the same data

A Business Unit can be:

• an individual consultant pharmacist
• two or more pharmacists working together on the same residential care facility/facilities
• a corporate medication management business that holds QUM contracts with a number of facilities and employs pharmacists to fulfil QUM services

All documents you generate are personalised to your Business Unit with your logo, business name and contact details, including:

• Medication Guides
• medication histories
• reports

Yes. Even though the data is all in the cloud, there is some installation required on your computer to provide access to that data. We take care of all of the installation process for you. QUMulus^® actually has four components:

• required: all users need a client application installed on their computer to be able to enter data and to access reports
• optional: users requiring access to reports need a “reports engine” installed on their computer; in reality, this is needed by nearly all users
• the database in the cloud: no installation on your computer
• authentication service: a cloud service separate from the database but linked to it; nothing to be installed, we will provide you with a UserID and password

QUMulus^® can be installed on any Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer. Preferences:

• we recommend the Professional versions of Windows (or better, e.g. Enterprise) rather than the Home version; however it does work on the Home versions
• the experience is better with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 or better, things are a bit cramped on cheap laptop screens with, say, 1280 x 768 resolution; having said that, we do have several users with low resolution screens and no-one has complained (QUMulus^® adapts)

Absolutely, the database is in the cloud so it requires the internet to connect to it. QUMulus^® data traffic through the internet is low volume, and protected by encryption, so any old internet connection should be fine. Many people use it through a mobile phone hotspot when they’re out of their (home) office.

The QUMulus^® licence fee is based on the bed licence count per facility. By default, we invoice quarterly in advance. As a bonus to subscribers QUMulus^® Medication Guides can be generated for any HMR recipient without incurring further costs.

No. The licence allows for limitless number of profiles to be entered and reports to be generated for each facility.

Medication Guides are person-centred summaries of currently prescribed regular and PRN medications aimed at improving medication literacy to support the safe administration of medication.

Information on a Medication Guide includes approved name of each medication, common brand names, common indications, general information about potential adverse effects and a crush code column. A colour-coded ‘sticker’ section groups medications into those that cause drowsiness, psychotropic medications, anticoagulants, opioids and those that pose a potential hazard to handlers of the medication. A benchmarking summary (number of regular medications, anticholinergic burden and number of regular psychotropic agents) in tabular format is printed at the end of the document.

Although Medications Guides are primarily written with nursing staff in mind, they are equally useful to distribute to residents and/or their surrogate decision-makers as well as to HMR recipients. They are designed to support informed consent.

Yes. However, none of the data is deleted – it remains in the database to contribute to aggregation of historical de-identified data for reporting purposes.

Yes. Contact QUMulus^® administration team for assistance.

Yes. Contact QUMulus^® administration any time. There’s also some troubleshooting help that registered users can access by logging in.

No. The database is live at all times. Only genuine residents and complete medication profiles should be entered, other QUMulus^® users rely on the integrity of the database.

A workaround if you need dummy data for demonstration purposes is to save reports of real data as Word documents and edit them to obfuscate sensitive data like the names of facilities and residents.

Our IT team is willing and able to work closely with clinical and RMMR report-writing software providers to streamline the process. We have successfully implemented automated imports in the past. Each clinical software provider needs to be assessed on a individual basis.

The QUMulus^® report engine consists of (1) a local database (i.e. on your computer, not in the cloud like your actual data) called SQL Server (QUMULUSREPORTS) and (2) a Microsoft component called SQL Server Reporting Services (QUMULUSREPORTS), either of which can become unresponsive for some unknown reason. There’s a simple procedure to reset them – authorised users can access access the procedure by logging in.