The goal is to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors as well as to increase production and personnel efficiency. Instead of 4 technicians handling drugs, the hospital now as one technician packaging and bar coding drugs and another supervising the robot. The hospital reports a 99.9% success rate.
January 2004
Monthly Archive
Fri 16 Jan 2004
A robot "pharmacist" by McKesson Corporation
has been implemented at Cox Health Systems' Cox South hospital in
Springfield, Mo. It is able to package and fill medication orders
for as many as 400 patients per day. Physicians at Cox South
enter prescriptions electronically which are sent directly to the
robot. It moves through the pharmacy on two tracks, retrieves the
prepackaged drugs with bar codes matching the order. The robot
also creates envelopes with bar code labels and deposits the completed
order. Pharmacy workers deliver the envelopes to the nursing staff.
The goal is to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors as well as to increase production and personnel efficiency. Instead of 4 technicians handling drugs, the hospital now as one technician packaging and bar coding drugs and another supervising the robot. The hospital reports a 99.9% success rate.
The goal is to improve patient safety and reduce medication errors as well as to increase production and personnel efficiency. Instead of 4 technicians handling drugs, the hospital now as one technician packaging and bar coding drugs and another supervising the robot. The hospital reports a 99.9% success rate.
Sat 3 Jan 2004
The Internet is set to become the basis for just about every form of
communication, according to net pioneer Vint Cerf. He was asked by the BBC to describe important changes that are ahead for the Internet.
The next decade, he believes, will see the Net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. He belives that the Net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the Net. We will see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top of basic internet infrastructure,with more and more layers of functionality showing up in the Net. One such could be Grid computing that virtualizes processing and storage resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for particular tasks.
According to Cerf, "If you have the ivory tower view that the Internet is good only if everything on it is good you are mistaken. The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."
The next decade, he believes, will see the Net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything. He belives that the Net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the Net. We will see a fairly dramatic increase in services riding on top of basic internet infrastructure,with more and more layers of functionality showing up in the Net. One such could be Grid computing that virtualizes processing and storage resources and lets people use, or rent, the capacity they need for particular tasks.
According to Cerf, "If you have the ivory tower view that the Internet is good only if everything on it is good you are mistaken. The internet is a reflection of our society and that mirror is going to be reflecting what we see. If we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society."