The former owner of a company that went into administration earlier this year has launched a new venture delivering barcode scanning technology to pharmacies.

Tariq Muhammad - former CEO of distance-selling company Pharmacy Plus, which supplied medicines to care homes - is marketing a barcode-scanning system through his new business Invatech Health. Pharmacy Plus closed unexpectedly in May because of cash flow shortages, forcing community pharmacies to supply the hundreds of care homes it supplied.

The Proactive Care System (PCS) used by Pharmacy Plus employed barcodes to help more than 600 care homes identify "thousands" of dispensing errors, Invatech said. It remained the "only solution" to scan medicines on this scale.

Mr Muhammad secured the intellectual property rights to PCS after "many" care homes contacted him following the closure of Pharmacy Plus to tell him they did not want to lose the system and the "positive impact" it had made to their care delivery.

The barcode technology could also be used to allow the dispensing of drugs to care homes in their original packaging. Invatech said this would remove the need for expensive, monitored-dose systems and would bring community pharmacy in line with the Department of Health's policy to introduce barcode validation technology into all care homes by 2018.

Mr Muhammad did not believe the closure of Pharmacy Plus would discourage pharmacies from using the system, as his competitors had "failed to match" it. "PCS is a product; Pharmacy Plus was a business," he explained.

Pharmacy Plus was launched in 1994 and Mr Muhammad made the "difficult decision" to leave the company last year. Invatech said the business had "deviated from [Mr Muhammed's] vision and aspirations" while it was under the control of a private equity firm.

Invatech said its "new and improved" PCS uses the same barcode technology but allows care homes to pick a preferred local pharmacy or other medicines supplier to meet their requirements. The system logs every transaction the medicine is involved in, from "prescription to consumption", it added.

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