Improving Safety with IV Robotics

Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD, Director of Pharmacy Services, Peninsula Regional Medical Center (PRMC), Salisbury, MD, discusses how implementing IV robotics has improved safety at PRMC. This video was filmed at the 2019 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Summer Meeting in Boston.

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Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD: When we leveraged IV robotics at Peninsula, in terms of product selection, one of the things we wanted to tackle was ready-to-administer syringes, or RTA syringes. This basically means that the pharmacy prepares the syringes so they don't need to be prepared on the floor or in the OR by the providers. And we felt like it's safer overall. If you look at the studies of when pharmacy prepares the syringes versus them prepared by nurses or anesthesia providers, there's a lot less error. So we knew that's something we wanted to tackle. And then an added level of safety is around leveraging IV robotics. So we know we don't have people in the pharmacy as part of the process, so we're not going to have contamination. We don't have to worry about calculation errors. There's actually a lot of steps in preparing these products, so by leveraging IV robotics for ready-to-administer syringes, we felt like our process was pretty safe overall.