Today’s presentation on pharmacy automation

The health care system I work for, Kaweah Delta Health Care District, uses quite a bit of automated technology from Talyst in our inpatient pharmacy. Well, today I spent the day in Bellevue, WA with the good folks from Talyst talking about all kinds of pharmacy automation and technology.

The day started with me giving a brief presentation at their quarterly meeting about Kaweah Delta’s experience installing Talyst equipment, and ended with a tour of their warehouse facility in Preston that included a peak at their process for managing and testing canisters for their AutoPack Oral Solid Packaging System; very interesting stuff.

Talyst was a wonderful host and I had a great time visiting their facilities and speaking with a bunch of very intelligent and interesting people. I learned a lot and had fun at the same time. You can’t ask for more than that.

View more presentations from Jerry Fahrni.

Comments

10 responses to “Today’s presentation on pharmacy automation”

  1. Very nice presentation Jerry! I like the before and after pictures of everything. I am sure you are happy to be working with the new toys!

  2. Jerry Fahrni

    Hey thanks pillguy. I love working with all this stuff. It’s some of the more interesting stuff that I do.

  3. Thanks Jerry for making the time to come and visit. Customer visits and real world stories of how you and your staff use (or don’t use) certain features of our products really helps make sure we stay on the mark. I hope you got a chance to visit the original downtown starbucks! Thanks again!

  4. Jerry

    I really enjoyed my visit, Carla, thanks for having me. I learned a lot from your great team. Tony got me to the original Starbucks and walked me around the market. He was a great host. Thank you again for your generosity and hospitality.

  5. Jerry,
    Wish I would have known you were coming to town… Pharmacy OneSource is right up the street from Talyst. I’m sure you had a tight schedule with all the great stuff going on there, but would have been great to connect and introduce you to some of the team since you were so close…

  6. Keith Walsh

    Jerry, I will take you up on your offer later on and just call you, one quick question how LONG did you guys (kaweah) have BCMA before CPOE

  7. Jerry Fahrni

    Hi Konrad,
    Bummer. I wish I would have known Pharmacy OneSource was just up the street. It would have been great to stop in and meet some new people and say hello to all the familiar ones. Looks like a missed opportunity for me. If I’m ever in the Seattle area again I’ll make it a point to touch bases. Although I’ve only been in your neck of the woods twice in my entire life, so it could be a while. ;-)
    Take care

  8. Jerry Fahrni

    Hey Keith,
    How are things in the big city? We’re just now starting down the road to CPOE. We thought we’d do BCMA first. Our Talyst installation was in Feb/Mar of 2008. This was the foundation for our BCMA implementation; get the pharmacy up and running with barcoding, work out the kinks then roll it out to the bedside. We’ve only been live with BCMA for a couple of months and so far it looks like the strategy paid off. Things are going quite smoothly. Feel free to call me anytime.

  9. Shaman9

    Great presentation. My concern about the carosel is that it seems like it would be slower vs the model of techs (i.e. more than one techy filling for different ADC lists) using a pick list and going to each bin, pulling, scanning etc. Can you comment?

  10. Jerry Fahrni

    Hi Shaman

    You have the same question that many of us had during implementation of the carousel technology. Initially the carousel was slower. However, the speed picked up significantly as the technicians got used to the system. In addition we made some changes to our workflow that ultimately made the process much smoother. Anecdotally we haven’t lost a step. Not sure if it’s any faster, but it certainly isn’t any slower.

    Jerry

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