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Around the office, MARTY is generally the quiet type, unless she's sorting prescriptions.
Then it's a symphony of whirrs and clicks as she plucks medications from rods where they hang and dishes them into personalized patient envelopes. During her nine months in the pharmacy at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center, she's sorted more than a million doses, an impressive but understandable number given that she works 24/7 and isn't slowed by the human needs to eat or recuperate.
She's an octagon-shaped robot --¬ The Medication Automated Robotic Technician for You, in fact -- that can hold as many as 900 individual doses of drugs in her chamber at once. She works by using a mechanical arm in the middle of the chamber that pivots and identifies medications using a barcode scanner.
Marilee Reed, the automation pharmacy lead technician, is responsible for making sure MARTY is up and running at all times. The difference the robot has made in the pharmacy is night-and-day, Reed said.
"We are best friends," she joked. "It's been a fun experiment."
Reed said MARTY saves technicians about two hours a night by automatically sorting prescriptions. That happens every three minutes as orders come in. The automatic process has not produced an error -- minus the occasional human error, like improper packaging of a drug -- since the $1 million machine was implemented last August, she said.
Jerome Wohleb, regional pharmacy director for Intermountain Health Care, said that's typical of each of the six robots -- built by a company called McKesson, and technically called a ROBOT-Rx -- that Intermountain owns. Similar machines are also in place in the Intermountain Medical Center, LDS Hospital, Primary Children's Medical Center, McKay-Dee Hospital Center and Dixie Regional Medical Center. The University Hospital in Salt Lake City also owns one.
"This is anywhere from about 100 to 200 times more accurate than humans," Wohleb said. He didn't have precise numbers, but said the introduction of MARTY and other robots has made him feel substantially better about the medications that patients are receiving.
"Before, we'd have a tech pull a stock and a pharmacy check it," he said.
The drugs still get checked, but not until they're administered at a patient's bedside. There, the drugs are scanned a second time and compared against a barcode on each patient's wristband, said Elizabeth Burnham, pharmacy manager at the hospital.
"It's a lot more rapid," she said.
Wohleb said that speed has additional benefits, like freeing up technicians to spend time in other areas.
It hasn't always been a match made in heaven, though, Reed said. When the machine first came to the hospital, she spent hours figuring out how to use it.
"Once in a while, we get little hiccups," she said. Those are mostly minor mechanical issues that regular maintenance clears up.
But the time savings MARTY produces as she fills about 115,000 prescriptions, or about 80 percent of all inpatient medications, endeared her to the staff, Reed said.
And yes, Reed reassured, MARTY is female -- there are too many boy robots out there. |
