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I became aware of Rowa Vmax a few weeks ago when I read an article about CareFusion purchasing the small German-based company.

From the Rowa brochure:

The Vmax Hospital from Rowa provides hospital pharmacists with an extremely flexible and high performance storage and dispensing system. When combined with the wide range of product options (almost) any thing is possible:

• High level of scalability in terms of capacity and speed
• Input speed per machine: up to 900 packs per hour
• Output speed per machine: up to 2,000 packs per hour
• Safety features: UPS, backup storage drive, stock scan, user identification with various permissions, refrigerator with data logger
• Recording of expiry dates and batch numbers
• Conveyor system: for optimised stock picking and commissioning for the wards

Combined with perfect integration into the hospital’s stock control system the result is clear, streamlined medicines management.

Stock intake, recording, storage and order picking for the wards: all of these previously manual activities can be done with Rowa in a fraction of the time normally required. Qualified personnel can now do qualified work, on the wards for example. This is a huge advantage, especially in times of increasing pressure on hospital staff budgets.

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Reuters: “A New York City hospital has stopped asking many patients to dig out health insurance cards and fill in endless forms, instead identifying them by scanning the unique lattice of veins in their palm.

The new biometric technology employed by New York University’s Langone Medical Center was expected to speed up patient check-ins and eliminate medical errors.

The system also has the virtue of not requiring the patient be conscious at the time of check-in, as is sometimes the case in emergency rooms.

The scanners are made by the technology services company Fujitsu and exploit the principle that, as with fingerprints and iris patterns, no two individuals’ palm-vein configurations are quite the same.

Using near-infrared waves, an image is taken of an individual’s palm veins, which software then matches with the person’s medical record. The initial set-up for a new patient takes about a minute, the hospital said, while subsequent scans only take about a second.”

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I attended one final session at the Summer Meeting today before heading back to the hotel to pack up my stuff, have some lunch and head for the airport; which is where I’m sitting now.

The session was titled Mobile Devices and Social Media: Enabling Your Professional and Personal Lives, and was delivered by Bill Felkey and Brent Fox. It was great. I thought I was pretty technology savvy, but I quickly found out that I still have a lot to learn. As with many sessions at this year’s Summer Meeting, this one was recorded and should be available at http://ce.ashp.org shortly. Do yourself a favor and go watch the audio-synched presentation. You won’t regret it.

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I’m in the market for a new smartphone so I’ve been looking around. My Motorola Droid still works just fine, but it’s starting to show its age. I’ve been waiting to see what the next Android phone version, i.e. Ice Cream Sandwich, has to offer before making a decision.

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