As one of the nation’s most automated hospital pharmacies, the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is using robotic technology and electronics with the goal of improving patient safety. Once computers at the pharmacy electronically receive medication orders from UCSF physicians and pharmacists, the robots pick, package, and dispense individual doses of pills. Machines assemble doses onto a thin plastic ring that contains all the medications for a patient for a 12-hour period, which is barcoded. Nurses use barcode readers to scan the medication at patients’ bedsides, verifying it is the correct dosage for the patient. The automated system also compounds sterile preparations of chemotherapy and non-chemotherapy doses and fills IV syringes or bags with the medications.
An automated inventory management system keeps track of all the products, and one refrigerated and two non-refrigerated automated pharmacy warehouses provide storage and retrieval of medications and supplies. By using robots instead of people for previous manual tasks, pharmacists and nurses have more time to work with physicians to determine the best drug therapy for a patient, and to monitor adverse drug reactions. The automated pharmacy currently serves UCSF hospitals at Parnassus and Mount Zion and has the capacity to dispense medications for the new UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, scheduled to open in early 2015. According to their website, not a single error has occurred in the 350,000 doses of medication prepared during the phased system implementation.
Source: University of California San Francisco (www.ucsf.edu).
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