Leading Edge Technology - from a medication dispensing robot to private patient rooms and new floors with full telemetry capabilities, Backus Hospital balances advancements in technology with patient needs.
Caregiver's View
Eric Arlia, RPh, Pharmacy |
Rapidly expanding technology is playing a major role in the way hospitals do business.We saw that firsthand at Backus Hospital in 2006.
As part of our $50-million expansion project, the hospital built a new stateof- the-art pharmacy and in March, added a pharmacy robot. The McKesson Robot Rx, or "Phil,"as we like to call him, is designed to dispense the most commonly used medications utilizing bar-code technology.
The robot has been shown to be virtually error-free through quality assurance testing done here in our pharmacy, as well as by the manufacturer. It dispenses approximately 3,000 doses per day that previously were filled by hand. Even if these had been filled by a human with 99.9 percent accuracy, it would still be equal to three dispensing errors each day. That's three too many.
The increase in efficiency we have gained by using the robot has allowed our pharmacists to devote more time to clinical activities — helping physicians dose antibiotics, monitoring drug levels of medications to ensure the most effective dose is given and converting appropriate patients from intravenous to oral medications.
The robot has 600 individual medication rods that hold the 450 most commonly prescribed medications that are dispensed to the patient medication carts. This accounts for more than 90 percent of all the medications we use. The robot is capable of dispensing most tablets, capsules, patches, liquid cups, and pre-filled syringes that are used in the hospital every day.
All medications dispensed in the robot are in special packaging that can be stored on metal rods inside the robot. The robot uses unique barcodes assigned to each individual medication and strength to verify that the right medication has been dispensed. This means that medications that have similar names or look alike are as different as black and white to the robot, eliminating the possibility the wrong one is accidentally dispensed.
The robot is just one piece of a medication safety initiative at Backus, and technology plays a crucial role. Our goal is to create a closed electronic loop of medication use including ordering,dispensing,and administration.
In this strategy,medications would be ordered electronically by physicians, electronically reviewed and verified by a pharmacist, dispensed by the robot utilizing bar-code technology, and administered and documented electronically by nurses.
In the coming year,we will begin bedside medication verification as part of our electronic medication documentation process. Our nurses already use computers to document all medications they give.
Bedside medication administration will allow the barcodes of all medications to be scanned to verify accuracy and ensure patient safety. The same barcodes that the robot uses to dispense medications will be used to perform this important safety check.
We are also in the process of piloting computerized physician order entry. A multidisciplinary team of physicians, pharmacists, nurses and information technology experts are strategizing to build a system that will allow physicians to easily order medications that offer the best treatment options for the most common diseases we treat.