Jerry Fahrni

Tag: Automation

  • Cool Technology for Pharmacy – Baxa Repeater Pump

    The Baxa Repeater Pump is a pretty cool piece of pharmacy technology. The device automates many of the repetitive processes used in filling oral syringes, oral dosage cups, syringes used for injection and reconstituting medications used to mix intravenous medications in the acute care setting. I remember working in a pediatric facility and watching the technicians fill thousands of oral syringes with liquid acetaminophen and ibuprofen for use in automated dispensing cabinets throughout the hospital. With the use of the Syringe Filling Fixture, and the automated pump setting on the Repeater Pump, the technicians could fill a phenomenal number of syringes in a very short period of time. Other times the technicians used the foot pedal on the Repeater Pump in order to control the rate at which the process moved; art in motion. Either way it was a bummer when they were finished as I had to check all those syringes. Regardless, the pump was a valuable piece of equipment when repetitive fluid transfer was required.
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  • It may be time to consider robotic IV preparation at the bedside

    Hospitals make a lot of intravenous (IV) preparations. That makes sense when you consider that most people admitted to the hospital are there because their acute illness requires more care than can be administered at home; not always, but in most cases. This is especially true for patients in the intensive care unit, i.e. the ICU.

    A fair number of the medications used in the ICU are prepared on demand for a host of reasons including stability, differences in concentration, difficulty in scheduling secondary to rate variability, etc. Any pharmacist or nurse reading this will understand what I’m talking about. Example medications that fall into this category include drips like norepinephrine, epinephrine, phenylephrine, amiodarone and nitroprusside.

    Last year I mused about using devices on the nursing stations designed to package oral solids on demand at the point of care. I still like the idea for several reasons, all of which can be found in the original post.  Based on currently available technology the same concept could be applied to preparation of IV products at the bedside. Robotic IV preparation has come a long way and these devices could be used at the point of care to make a nurses, and patient’s, life a whole lot easier. The use of robotic IV preparation at the bedside could reduce wait times for nurses and lesson the workload on pharmacy.
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  • Talyst goes live with new customer portal

    Talyst has been beta-testing a new customer portal for several months now. The idea was introduced to Talyst customers at their user group meeting during the ASHP Summer Meeting in Chicago last June. Beta-testing took place between the summer meeting and December 2009 when Talyst unveiled the portal to a larger user group meeting in Las Vegas at the ASHP Midyear. Attendees were given a demonstration of the portal and offered an opportunity to provide feedback on possible issues or features they’d like to see. Well, it appears that the portal is out of the beta phase and ready for use.


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  • Cool Technology for Pharmacy

    IV Automation / Robotics

    Today I attended a webinar from Baxa titled “Improving Sterile Compounding Quality Through Automation” given by Eric Kastango RPh, MBA, FASHP. The presentation was very interesting. I thought it was going to focus more on technology, but it was heavy on the human component of contamination in the clean room environment with only minor mention of automated IV devices. Anyway, during the presentation Kastago talked a bit about robotic automation for clean rooms and mentioned the CytoCare Robot.

    The CytoCare Robot is a chemotherapy compounding robot in an ISO class 5 environment. According to the website CytoCare is “the world’s first and only automated robotic system for the safe compounding of hazardous, life-critical cancer therapy medications.”


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  • Panasonic robot drug dispenser

    Engadget.com: “Panasonic isn’t the first company to turn to robots as a means for dispensing drugs, but it looks like it’s set to become one of the bigger players in the still fledgling field, with it announcing today that it’s developing a robot that it hopes will rake it about 30 billion yen (or $315 million) by 2016. Unfortunately, Panasonic isn’t quite ready to actually show off the robot just yet, but it says it could be making the rounds at some Japanese hospitals by next March, and head into the United States and Europe sometime after that. It’s also not ready to do much talking about specifics, with it only going so far as to say that it “does not look humanoid” but rather looks like “a cabinet with lots of small drawers”, and that it’ll be able to store medical data for each patient and sort out prescriptions for up to 400 patients in about two hours. That cabinet won’t come cheap though, with Panasonic estimating that it’ll cost “several tens of millions of yen,” or hundreds of thousands of dollars.” – When I was a pharmacy student at UCSF there was an automated drug dispensing robot roaming the halls. The robot was affectionately called Elvis. It was pretty cool to see him roll out of the elevator and down the hall to the nursing station, but he was nothing like ASIMO.