Robotic workbench to prepare hazardous drugs

Abstract

The pharmacy staff at the University of Colorado Hospital near Denver is getting a helping hand in safety—a robotic one. A CytoCare robotic workbench (see Figure 1) arrived in mid-November from Health Robotics in Italy to improve the safety of pharmacy-prepared injectable chemotherapy doses, said Pharmacy Director Nancy Stolpman. “I.V. rooms, I believe, are one of the most dangerous places left in a hospital,” Stolpman said. The use of bar-code technology at patients’ bedside has improved the safety of medication administration, Stolpman said. Computerized prescriber order entry has decreased the number of prescribing errors. Pharmacy information systems help detect adverse drug reactions, potential drug–drug interactions, and dosages outside normally acceptable ranges. But a nurse about to administer a pharmacy-prepared i.v. admixture, she said, “does not know what’s in that bag. They’ve got 100% faith in us that we made the product correct.” Stolpman said her pharmacists catch calculation and mixing errors before the technician-prepared doses leave the i.v. admixture room. But, she admitted, not all errors have been caught.