Health Robotics will be launching its new i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists' Mid-Year Meeting to be held Dec. 6-10 in Las Vegas. With i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine, Health Robotics has become the first company in the world to provide a total automation solution that provides automated process control and patient safety in the I.V. Room.
i.v.SOFT's Workflow Engine will fully automate IV Admixtures by providing automation tools to address the IV preparation of patient doses that cannot be physically handled by robotics technology due to reasons like hospital choices of ampoules, non-standard IV Bags and diverse Elastomeric infusion devices. In a release, Werner Rainer, Health Robotics' CEO, said i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine and its optional modules (Dashboard, Profile, Cube, and Interface Engine) represent an important milestone for Health Robotics. With the release of TPNstation to the market in late 2010, Health Robotics will be the leader of the I.V. Room Automation market.
The challenges in IV Admixture operations are serious medication errors like 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. Even though robots CytoCare and i.v.STATION automatically compound the majority of hazardous and non-hazardous IV doses, hospitals are demanding complementary automation solutions for the 20-30% of IV doses that need to be routed to manual compounding on BSCs (biological safety cabinets). i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine offers hospital pharmacies the ability to have their pharmacy technicians work more efficiently while at the same time reducing costs due to IV Admixtures that are typically lost or re-made.
According to Fabio Fioravanti, Health Robotics' chief software architect, building the i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine upon the product specifications, customer experience, software logic and industrial component integration (digital camera, Barcode and RFID technologies and precision scale gravimetric controls) already utilized for CytoCare and i.v.STATION proved to be a highly-complementary research and development project.
A supplier of life-critical intra-venous medication preparation, compounding, and dispensing robots, Health Robotics provides healthcare facilities in four continents with robotics technology and software automation solutions. Health Robotics’ CytoCare improves patient safety through the effective and efficient production of sterile, accurate and ready-to-administer IVs. In addition, the comprehensive control system of CytoCare will double check each preparation and eliminate risks related to drug exchange or unacceptable dosage errors. i.v.STATION is an automated system designed for patient-specific preparation of injectable drugs within an air-controlled environment.
Calvin Azuri is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of Calvin’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Patrick Barnard
