How a robot can terminate medical errors for kids

14.07.2009
In a children's hospital, dispensing medicine is more complicated than putting pills in a bottle. Youthful patients come in a wide variety of ages and sizes, which means their dosages must be individually tailored.

Hundreds or thousands of medicines must be made up and delivered daily. Combine that with the breadth of not-always-easy-to-distinguish medicines and dosages and even careful pharmacists and other medical personnel can slip up when tired or distracted.

Now, technology has arrived that its makers promise can drastically cut down on drug-related errors. The Robotic Intravenous Automation (RIVA) device made by is a robotic arm that can prepare sterile IV syringes and bags behind its glass case.

RIVA's software is a custom-built .Net 2.0 app written in C# running on Microsoft's operating system on an Intel processor. To make the code lean, RIVA relies heavily on scripts stored inside a Sybase Inc. , Doherty said.

The $1.2 million system, released late last year, is already in use at three children's hospitals in the U.S., with another two facilities preparing to deploy it, according to Thom Doherty, CTO at Intelligent Hospital Systems. "We can never bring the risk down to zero, but with RIVA we are bringing the risk as low as possible," he said.

How? For repetitive-but-critical tasks like preparing medicines, it's a no-brainer that robots are better than people, Doherty said. "A machine doesn't lose attention or focus like a human does," he said.