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.