Implementing IV Robotics in Hospital Pharmacy

Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD, Director of Pharmacy Services, Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury, MD, discusses how his hospital utilized IV robotics to prepare pharmacy products on site. The video was filmed during the 2019 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Summer Meeting in Boston.

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Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD: When we implemented IV Robotics at Peninsula, first and foremost, we had to set up a standard process for how we prepare doses. We created a process map or workflow for our pharmacy technicians to use.

The technology is pretty advanced, but the process is actually pretty simple to use. You load the device with the components that it needs to prepare the mixtures. That would include syringes, the drug, and in some cases, an IV bag. It depends on what you’re preparing. Once you load the robot up, you pretty much let it go, and it will prepare the products.

The robot will automatically label the products, and it will let you know when the products are ready to be retrieved and picked up. At that point, you can decide on what’s next in your process. A lot of that varies from hospital to hospital. For us, we send out those products to an outside lab for additional testing before we use it on a patient. It’s not always needed, but for some of our products, that’s how we set it up.

So, to wrap up, the technology is pretty advanced, but the training is pretty simple. It takes about 8 hours to train 1 of our technicians to get it up and running. Then, after that, they’re pretty much ‘hands free’ at that point. They can work autonomously with minimal supervision and oversight. The technology works pretty well.