Mercy pharmacy reopens with robotic system

By Cindy Hadish
The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS — Just three weeks into Desmond Waters’ new job as Mercy Medical Center’s pharmacy director, disaster struck.

Pharmacy technician Paula Sion demonstrates how Mercy Medical Center Pharmacy's new MedCarousel helps organize medications during an open house. The MedCarousel can slash picking and restocking errors by up to 96 percent. Photo by Chrid Mackler.

The pharmacy, in Mercy’s basement, was ruined by the historic June flood.

“It went from complete organization to total chaos,” said Mercy CEO Tim Charles.

Nearly 11 months later and no longer in the basement, the hospital’s pharmacy has been more than rebuilt.

Mercy unveiled its new, fully automated, 7,500-square-foot pharmacy last week during an employee open house.
A robotic medication system, fully integrated with a drug storage carousel, high speed packager and special software, is central to the operation.

The automation improves accuracy and will be used in conjunction with Mercy’s bedside medication verification, a bar code system that’s set to begin in June.

Waters said the robotic system pulls and “counts” single-dose packages about 6,000 times a day and is expected to handle more than 2 million doses in a year.

And while the machine does the work of three technicians and two full-time pharmacists, he said, it doesn’t replace the pharmacy staff.

In fact, five full-time pharmacists have been added since the flood.

Those employees will be able to spend more time on patient floors, rather than filling prescriptions, Waters said.
Most importantly, the new system offers “99.99 percent” accuracy, he said.

Since 2000, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has received more than 95,000 reports of medication errors.
The automated system virtually eliminates the chances of error, Waters said.

It works like this: when a prescription is ordered, the robot picks that specific medication by reading the bar-code on the package and inserts it into an envelope labeled with a patient-specific bar code.

Medication will be given to the patient only after the patient wristband and medication are scanned and a match is verified.

The pharmacy, which cost $2.6 million including construction and the new medication system, is on the hospital’s first floor in the site of the former Eye Surgery Center.

Waters, who came to Iowa from a Michigan hospital, said Mercy’s administration could have delayed the project as the hospital recovered from the flood, but chose to make the investment.

“It really was a silver lining,” he said.

© 2009 Gazette Communications