St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center, like many American hospitals these days, tries to emphasize the human touch -- except in the pharmacy. That's where the human touch, with the potential for human error, can do more harm than good.
On a recent morning, pharmacist Michael Culligan, the intravenous team leader at the Hartford, Conn., hospital, motioned to a glass-walled machine about the size of a bus shelter in the hospital's bright, bustling basement pharmacy. "It takes out the human element," he said.
The device is the IntelliFill i.v., a $650,000 Rube Goldberg-like device that can turn out up to 60 drug-filled, patient-specific syringes an hour in a process designed to ensure that the right medicine in the right dose gets to the right patient every time. St. Francis put the IntelliFill in service earlier this month and is one of only seven U.S. hospitals with such a device.
The syringes are used to pump drugs into intravenous lines that have been inserted into patients. The hospital goes through millions each year.
The machine, manufactured by ForHealth Technologies Inc. of Daytona Beach, Fla., represents a larger movement to computerize the ordering, filling and delivery of medicines in hospitals and pharmacies. In 1999, the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 98,000 Americans die each year because of medical errors, with about 7,000 resulting from medication errors. Since then, hospitals have moved to computerized systems that eliminate handwriting errors in prescription orders. Hospitals and community pharmacies alike also are increasingly using devices that automate the prescription-filling process.
"It's growing almost daily," said Robert McCarthy, dean of the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy.
In the IntelliFill i.v. machine, each vial of medicine moves along a kind of production line until the machine spits out the finished syringe. Load the device with vials of the most prescribed medicines, and it begins filling a prescription by grabbing the appropriate drug vial and reading the bar code. The machine then shoots four digital photographs of the vial label, removes the cap and swabs the vial with alcohol. If the drug is a powder or concentrated liquid, the machine will mix in the correct amount of liquid. Then the device inserts a needle into the vial, extracts the needed amount of medicine and fills an intravenous syringe.
