Health Robotics on Oct. 12 announced the manufacturing, shipment and subsequent field installation of the first five i.v.STATION post-prototype robots in the U.S. and in Spain. They will be installed within four to five weeks. Health Robotics is a supplier of life-critical intra-venous medication preparation, compounding and dispensing Robots, providing healthcare facilities with robotics technology and software automation solutions.
The company also announced that its i.v.STATION robots won the Area Science Park 3L 3T Innovation Award, which is given to the best technology product across all industries.
The primary challenges in today's IV 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, according to the company. i.v.STATION automatically and aseptically compounds non-hazardous IV doses and dispenses them to clinical staff in a ready-to-administer patient formats for antibiotics, pain therapy, anti-virals, epidurals, and other IVs and injectable medications.
The robot was designed to address the above-mentioned 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.
