Pill Picker, Med Sorter, Life Saver!

Reported February 2010

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Medication errors cause at least 7,000 deaths in the United States each year. It's a problem that health care systems work hard to prevent. Now a new technology is helping prevent mediation mistakes.

Mathy Milling Downing's daughter Candace was the light of her life.

"Candace was the most beautiful, loving little girl," Milling Downing recalled to Ivanhoe. "She was everybody's friend."

A series of medication errors took her life.

"I took her to the doctor that afternoon," Milling Downing explained. "He said she's great, come back in two weeks, and my beautiful, happy, loving 12 year old, hanged herself."

Candace was accidently given an overdose of an anti-depressant drug, causing suicidal thoughts … and worse. Now to help eliminate medication errors, doctors of pharmacy are using a new robot called PillPick manages hospital meds.

"PillPick insures that the proper medication is packaged and placed on a ring for an individual patient. It reduces filling errors," John Ilic, Pharm.D., of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., said.

The robot places single doses of medication in small plastic bags. Each bag has a bar code identifying the drug. A nurse will scan the bar code along with a bar code on the patient's wristband. If the computer detects a wrong drug or wrong dose, a warning will appear and the computer will sound an alert.

"The pill picker prevents the wrong medication from being given to the patient at the bedside," Dr. Ilic said.

The multi-tasking robot does all the packaging, dispensing and storage. Minimizing human intervention helps reduce human errors -- something Milling Downing supports.

"I have become a drug safety advocate for consumers union who are doing a lot to safeguard medications," Milling Downing said.

Humans and robots work to help keep patients safe.

The Food and Drug Administration says that at least one death occurs per day and 1.3 million people are injured each year due to medication errors.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jim Ritter
Senior Manager, Media Relations
Loyola University Medical Center
(708) 216-2445
jritter@lumc.edu

American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists
Joseph Catapano
Communication Specialist
(703) 248-4772
http://www.aapspharmaceutica.com
catapanoj@aaps.org

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE
Pender McCarter
IEEE http://www.ieee.org
IEEE-USA http://www.ieeeusa.org
p.mccarter@ieee.org

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