NYC Health + Hospitals' Elmhurst location dismantled its 20-year-old prescription-filling robot and replaced it with another that can fill 120 prescriptions each hour and carry 140 products, the site's pharmacy director, Peter Barber, PharmD, told Becker's.
The new robot, ARxIUM, was installed a month ago and "is doing beautifully right now," he said, as it can work on two patients at once, is almost always accurate, and is "a heck of a lot faster" at counting tablets and capsules.
The older robot was connected to a printer in the hospital's billing area — on a different floor — which created a workflow problem for the pharmacy team. Now, once a pharmacist enters the order information, the device puts the correct number of medications into the vial, puts the number on the vial and closes the cap.
"If you put any kind of human endeavor in things or if you mess up what you put in the robot, there's always some possibility of a mistake, but if you follow everything the way you're supposed to do it," Dr. Barber said, "the chances of any mistake is significantly reduced."