The new prescription-filling robot at Loyola University Hospital can dispense as many as 600 doses of various medications in an hour and it does so with an innovative system of safeguards that will dramatically improve the number of human errors that can jeopardize a patient’s health.

One recent and much-publicized case of human error occurred in the actor Dennis Quaid’s family, when his newborn twins were given 10,000 units of the anticoagulant heparin when they were prescribed only 10 units.  The heparin bottles look almost identical and were placed in the wrong drawers, causing the mix-up.

The $1.5 million robot uses two mechanical arms to place capsules, tablets, suppositories, vials, and ampules into one-dose size bags that are bar coded.  When fully operational, nurses administering the medications to patients will scan the bar-coded baggies to compare them with a patient’s bar-coded wrist band.  A warning window, with an audio alert, will pop open on screen if the bagged medication and the patient’s wrist bands don’t match.

The robot, 13 feet wide and 28 feet long, handles 3,200 medications on a round-the-clock basis and never needs the weekend off.  One end of the robot is outfitted with the two mechanical arms which bag up the medications and then sends the bags to the other end of the mechanism, where they are arranged in the order the patient needs to take them.  They’re then attached to a plastic ring which gets an identification card and pertinent patient information.

The Institute of Medicine reported that medication errors in 2006 threatened the health of as many as 400,000 hospitalized patients that year, at a cost of $3.5 billion.  In addition to dosage errors similar to that of the Quaid babies case, misspellings are another common source of errors, such as when hydrochlorothiazide, a diuretic, is misread as hydrocortisone, an anti-inflammatory drug.

The robot, trademark-named PillPick, is one of five systems Loyola University Hospital administrators explored before choosing this one as the most innovative.  The machine is a product of SwissLog Healthcare Solutions and is the first such system to be used in a Midwestern hospital.

The medicine-dispensing robot will not eliminate pharmacy jobs but is expected to free up the hospital’s pharmacy staff for deployment directly to nursing units, where they can better serve the needs of the hospital’s patients.