Pharmacies go robotic

The colonel is actually Cox’s Overly Large, Mechanically Ultra-Swift, Technologically Advanced Robotic Device – and it’s been in use at Cox since October 2002.

Both CoxHealth and St. John’s are using automation such as COL. MUSTARD to cut down on adverse drug events among their patient populations, though St. John’s did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

The American Medical Association says more than 2.2 million adverse drug events occur each year in the United States.

Causes of drug interaction problems vary. Issues include the more than 30 percent of prescriptions given directly to patients by their doctors; the high number of incidents of confusion between drug names; and excessive dosages, which contribute to half of all adverse drug events.

CoxHealth’s pharmacy robot system, produced by McKesson Corp., supplies prescriptions for all three CoxHealth hospitals. The system cost the hospital $1.2 million, according to Mary Fox, CoxHealth pharmacy automation specialist.

CoxHealth officials say automation has increased efficiency in several ways.

Producing a day’s worth of prescriptions for patients who already are hospitalized, along with the new prescriptions added each day for new patients at the three facilities, used to take eight hours of work by five pharmacy technicians; the new system requires only two technicians to do the same work.

March of this year was the robot’s busiest month; it dispensed 5,500 doses per day that month.

“The robot doesn’t take vacations, he doesn’t call in sick, and he does have a little down time every now and then, but he’s been extremely reliable,” Fox said. “The pharmacists don’t have to check medications, so they can spend more time working with physicians and monitoring patients.”

Also, once the drugs are received and repackaged in individually bar-coded doses, state regulators have said that with automation, random accuracy checks are sufficient; when done by hand, all prescriptions had to be double-checked for accuracy.

The robots, however, are just part of the equation.

Once the medications have been sorted and prepared for the patients, a new coding system kicks in – an effort to better organize patient information.

Lynne Yaggy, CoxHealth director of nursing, said that in addition to adding bar codes to all medications, the hospital is working to implement a complete electronic medication administration record, or EMAR.

“As the pharmacist enters the medication, the robot pulls it. The nurse takes her handheld device, which is a bar code device and a small computer, and scans the drug, the patient and herself,” Yaggy said. “If that medication were not on that medication profile, it will alert me that this is the wrong medication.”

The bar codes on patients and nurses have been added, while the rest of the system is being tested at Cox Walnut Lawn. Yaggy said the entire Cox system should have the EMAR in place before the end of the year.

That coding information also is used in the hospital’s automated dispensing cabinets, which keep track of both the amount of medication given to each patient, but also who is dispensing it and what is being dispensed.

CoxHealth’s Fox describes the cabinets as an automated teller machine for drugs.

“The nurse walks up to the cabinet and says, ‘Give me a Benadryl for Mr. Smith.’ The cabinet software will say, ‘No, you can’t have one – the physician hasn’t ordered it and the pharmacist hasn’t verified it.’ Or it will say, ‘Yes, it’s appropriate for Mr. Smith, here’s your Benadryl.’”[[In-content Ad]]