Optimizing IV Robotics in Hospital Pharmacy

Dennis Killian, PharmD, PhD, Director of Pharmacy Services, Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury, MD, discusses techniques to optimize the use of IV robotics in a hospital pharmacy setting. 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: So at Peninsula we've been leveraging IV robotics for a number of years now, and whenever using any technology, including IV robotics, it's important to continuously monitor your data and try to optimize the use of the technology. Thinking back, with IV robotics, there are 2 ways we could really optimize its use. One is through personnel considerations. When we first implemented IV robotics, we had a rotating pool of pharmacy technicians that would operate the device, but over time we felt that that actually was not the best strategy for us. And what we did was we dedicated personnel that actually ran the robot consistently. When we made that change, which seems to be a small change, we actually had higher throughput and higher yield of our products through the robot. So it was kind of a win for us.

Another way you can optimize the use of IV robotics is just maintaining and checking into your product portfolio, and continuously monitoring the 503B landscape to make sure that you're using the best medicines for that particular technology. Now this doesn't mean that you're changing your product portfolio week-to-week or month-to-month, but year-over-year you might want to make some changes based on what technology you're using that product to help create.