The University of California at San Francisco Medical Center is now starting to use robots, not humans, to dispense medication from its hospital pharmacy.
While robots are often brought into workplaces as a cost-cutting measure, UCSF claims that in this case, it’s to minimize the chances of patients receiving the wrong medication. So far, it seems to be working out well – out of 350,000 doses of oral and injectable medication prepared to date, not a single error has occurred.
Utilizing Swisslog’s PillPick system, bulk batches of pills are separated out into individual doses, bagged and stored. UCSF physicians electronically send orders in to the system, which then proceeds to pick and dispense the appropriate pills. All the bagged doses of all the pills that a patient will need within a 12-hour period are strung together on a plastic ring, and bar-coded. There are plans for nurses to use bar code readers, to confirm that the right medication ends up going to the right patients.
An automated inventory system keeps track of how much medication is in stock.
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- Middlesex Hospital Pharmacy to Become Automated with Swisslog (prweb.com)
