Hospital Helps Growing Pains with Robotic Dispensing Technology
Brigham and Women’s Hospital is a 720-bed academic medical center serving the downtown Boston community. Bill Churchill, Director of Pharmacy Services, was concerned because the hospital experienced a rapid growth in prescription volume and longer patient wait times. He did not want to add staff, but needed to meet these challenges with technology, expand the capacity of the BWH Outpatient Pharmacy, and lower the wait times for patients. Les Bucey of the pharmacy team said,
“We decided we needed to move forward with technology to meet our goals of customer satisfaction and keeping wait times low. The old technology was burdensome to use.”
The pharmacy department had a major goal of reducing the potential for errors, and having a system that uses robotics and barcode scanning was vital to meeting this goal. It was also important to have complementary technology that would provide the same safety features for filling nonrobotic dispensed medications.
BWH invested in the SP 200 and SP Central Workflow System. The workflow system complements the new robotic dispensing technology by coordinating the entire pharmacy workflow. It identifies and batches all prescriptions for every patient to ensure proper medication delivery.
This ScriptPro automation enables the pharmacists at BWH outpatient pharmacy to spend more time with patients and bring more order to the workflow.