Contributor: Stanton McComb, President, McKesson Automation

It’s been an extremely lively first day at the ASHP Meeting and Exhibition. I started my day at the early morning breakfast symposium where Eric Kastango, an expert on IV compounding from Clinical IQ, LLC and Tom Crampton, Director of Pharmacy Services at Allegiance Health, discussed how hospitals can provide a safer environment for both patients and staff with IV compounding automation.  

On that topic, it’s interesting to take a look at how hospital automation has evolved.  McKesson took the lead in automating the dispensing of oral solids – using medication dispensing robots in the pharmacy and cabinets on the nursing units have become the standard of care.  And now, we really need to take a look at what I consider to be the last “gap” in pharmacy automation – the IV room.

Hospitals are facing real challenges when it comes to compounding hazardous IV medications, and it’s clear there are many contributing pain points:  dose accuracy, sterility, waste, high costs, and staff safety.  If you think about it in simple terms – when you look at a prepared IV bag, can you really tell what’s in it?  It’s clear liquid. How can you tell that the dosing was correct and that it’s sterile? 

During the presentation this morning, Eric provided some eye-opening stats that help illustrate the magnitude of the problem:  The “Study of Accuracy in Compounding IV Admixtures at Five Hospitals,” in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy showed that 9 out of every 100 IV doses mixed in the hospital pharmacy contained at least one error, posing a substantial risk to patients; and the Pharmacy Purchasing and Products 2009 State of Pharmacy Compounding Survey showed that 30% of hospitals report that a patient incident involving  a compounding error has occurred at their institution in the past five years (225 hospitals were surveyed).  These are very telling.  

I had the opportunity to talk with many customers today in our booth where we are demonstrating our automated IV compounding solutions, and almost everyone I talked to reiterated the need for safety and accuracy in the sterile compounding areas.  A few even mentioned errors that recently occurred at their facility that could have been prevented with our solutions.  

When I hear comments like this, it just validates that we are offering hospitals the right IV automation solutions that help alleviate those critical pain points that hospitals are experiencing.  

It’s been an exciting first day with all of the buzz around IV automation, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for the next two days.