McKessen Pharmaceutical Robots

Got to tour McKessen's business center outside of Pittsburgh today as part of my Healthcare Systems Engineering course. Two CMU students took a robotics project to the market when they designed a robot that uses bar codes to package and dispense medication to hospital patients. There are all kinds of pharmacy "solutions" now, designed to limit human error associated with medications (as well as fraudulent and criminal activities to do with medications).

Their next project? The "last 50 feet", which is to say, the distance from a floor's medication cabinet and the patient room. Though they use patient wrist-band barcodes to verify the correct patient-to-meds, a nurse, etc. still has to physically transport the goods from the cabinet to the patient rooms, which, believe it or not, can actually lead to a few human-related problems. It's a pretty neat system though, and it frees up PhD-trained pharmacists to do something other than counting and checking.. imagine that!