PHARMACY ROBOT UNVEILED:
“PHARGO” DELIVERS HER FIRST DOSE

Driscoll Children's Hospital’s New Pharmacy Robot
Driscoll Children's Hospital ? Corpus Christi, TX
Friday, January 16, 2004
11:00 a.m.

(Corpus Christi, TX) A true state-of-the-art employee! Driscoll Children’s Hospital’s newest employee is “Phargo”. The robot is housed in the hospital’s new pharmacy area complete with glass port holes where patients and visitors will be able to watch it hard at work, toiling and talleying. The name, “Phargo” was picked after patients took part in a naming contest. Nine-year-old, Edin Reyes was the contest winner and will help with the unveiling of our newest employee.

“Phargo” is very versatile and is equipped to handle many jobs. The new pharmacy robot will manage pharmacy costs, automate routine manual tasks, and is expected to reduce medication errors as well as inventory and labor costs. The robot uses bar codes and scanners to ensure accuracy. Racks along interior walls hold more than 300 medications while a pneumatic arm swings to the proper rack to read bar codes. Once “Phargo” matches the correct bar code with the prescription entered by the pharmacist, the robot pulls the medication off the rack and places it on a conveyor belt.

“Our commitment is always to provide the best for our children and this technology will help ensure that we maintain an environment that is safe and trustworthy,” said Rick Merrill, CEO and President of Driscoll Children's Hospital. “This robotic system dispenses medication quickly and accurately while freeing up Driscoll’s pharmacists, allowing them to spend more time with patients and their families explaining medications and answering questions.”

The new centralized robotic drug distribution system will fill 70% of Driscoll’s 1,500 daily doses of medication. The hospital’s pharmacy dispenses 45,000 doses monthly and nearly 550,000 annually. Mixed or refrigerated prescriptions will still be filled manually. To date, systems similar to the one Driscoll recently purchased have dispensed more than 365 millions drugs error free.

When the robot is not filling prescriptions, it is busy consolidating inventory, monitoring expiration dates, and identifying which medications need to be ordered. In continual communication with the pharmacy’s computer system, the robot also keeps track of all patient admissions, discharges, and transfers, as well as changes in physician orders.

About Driscoll Children’s Hospital
“Improve the health of adults and you give them back their health …
Improve the health of children and you give them their life.”

Since opening its doors in 1953, Driscoll Children’s Hospital has been offering hope and healing to the children of South Texas for half a century. The facility is a 189-bed pediatric tertiary care center with pediatric board-certified specialists representing 19 medical and nine surgical specialties. Each year, more than 6,000 children are admitted for inpatient care, 5,000 for day surgery, and 50,000 for outpatient primary and specialty care, as well as 40,000 for emergency care, as the first South Texas hospital with emergency services exclusively for children. Additionally, Driscoll maintains a state-of-the-art ground/air transport team, 20-bed pediatric intensive care unit, 40-bed neonatal intensive care unit, and specialized medical outreach.

www.driscollchildrens.org

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