Health Robotics ships first IV medication preparation robots to US
and Spain
29 October 2009
Italian company Health Robotics has announced the installation
of the first five i.v.STATION post-prototype robots in the US and in
Spain.
The company has also announced that its i.v.STATION robot has won the
Area Science Park 3L 3T Innovation Award, which is given to the best
technology product across all industries.
i.v.STATION represents a revolutionary approach in the quest for
safe, accurate, efficient, and cost effective intravenous and
ready-to-administer patient doses. It offers unprecedented reduction of
medication errors, ISO compliant accuracy, sterility, and clinician
labour savings, all within a scalable, cost-effective, distributed, and
fail-safe architecture.
The first 5 of 20 installations are scheduled to begin at selected
installations in Spain and the US in the next few weeks.
The primary challenges in today's intravenous admixture operations
are serious medication errors such as drug exchange and accuracy
mistakes, high costs, life-critical turn-around time, intravenous drugs
waste, regulatory issues, and difficulty in maintaining adequately
trained clinical staff.
i.v.STATION automatically and aseptically compounds non-hazardous IV
doses and dispenses them to clinical staff in ready-to-administer
patient formats for antibiotics, pain therapy, antivirals, epidurals,
and other IVs and injectable medications.
i.v.STATION was designed to address the industry-challenges, and to
overcome the fact that until now, the range of products and technology
available to mitigate these widespread industry patient safety and
financial problems has consisted of variations on the IV "piggyback"
bag, outsourcing of IVs, and 1990s-developed automated 'solutions' that
have seen little or no adoption and success over the past twenty years.
Werner Rainer, Health Robotics' CEO, said, "These first five
shipments of i.v.STATION represent the culmination of extraordinary work
by our engineers and beta test customers and, I hope, also the start of
a new era for Health Robotics in bringing our robots and software
automation solutions out of the pharmacy basement and into the nurse
stations [wards] and satellite pharmacies, as close as we can get to the
patients.