Health Robotics has announced that it will complete installation of five i.v.STATION post-prototype robots in the U.S and Spain before November this year.

Health Robotics also announced that its i.v.STATION robot has won the Area Science Park 3L 3T Innovation Award in recognition of its unique technology.

Health Robotics supplies life-critical intra-venous medication preparation, compounding, and dispensing Robots enabled by robotics technology and software automation solutions.

i.v.STATION provides safe, accurate and efficient intravenous and ready-to-administer patient doses. This minimizes medication errors significantly and ensures ISO compliance, sterility and clinical labor savings. The cost effective, scalable architecture of the i.v.STATION will benefit medical institutions in Spain and the US, said company sources.

In a release, Paolo Giribona, director of research and development for Health Robotics, expressed his happiness on being selected for the innovation award.

“After quite an intense summer we are very pleased both in winning the 3L 3T Innovation Award and with the initial results of i.v.STATION in laboratory and factory tests, quite sufficient in my opinion to feel confident about releasing i.v.STATION for installations this Fall, as we had planned all along after the results of two generation of prototypes we built in late 2008 and early 2009,” he said.

Company sources said that in IV Admixture operations there are chances of serious medication errors occurring due to drug exchanges, accuracy mistakes and it also suffers form high costs, life-critical turn-around time, intravenous drug waste, regulations and shortage of trained clinical staff.

In such cases i.v.STATION usage is most advantageous as it automatically and aseptically compounds IV doses and dispenses them to clinical staff. These are ready to administer to patients according to their requirement whether it is antibiotics, pain therapy, anti-virals, epidurals or other IVs and injectable medications.

Werner Rainer, CEO of Health Robotics said, “These first five shipments of i.v.STATION represent the culmination of extraordinary work by our engineers and beta test customers and, I hope, also the start of a new era for Health Robotics in bringing our robots and software automation solutions out of the pharmacy basement and into the nurse stations or wards and satellite pharmacies, as close as we can get to the patients.”

Health Robotics sources said that the products and technology available till date were not optimized for patient safety and often IVs were outsourced. The older automated solutions developed for this purpose fell short of widespread adoption and had lower success rates.