King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center in Riyadh now has computerized robot providing pharmaceutical services such as dispensing medication. The service went into operation on Monday. The first of its kind in the Middle East, it reduces medication errors by 80%, the hospital said. Dr. Gassem Al-Kosaibi, General Executive Supervisor of King Faisal Specialist Hospital, said the total cost of the robot and its accessories is SR30 million. The robot pharmacist is capable of dispensing upto 90 percent of the hospital's medicines, packaging thousands of doses of drugs and works 24 hours a day. The robotic system has 22 computerized drug dispensing cabinets equipped with large servo-driven arms located in a 100 square-foot octagonal enclosure. Its arms rotate and grab packets of bar code labeled drugs. Dr. Al-Kosaibi said robots were playing an increasingly important role in hospital pharmacies. As an automated pharmacy compounding device, it reads files from a database of orders, selects the correct drug, mixes it, places the mixture in a syringe, and labels the syringe with the patient's name and the name of the drug. He said the outpatient pharmacy receives about 1,000 patients with an average number of 3,000 prescriptions daily. It operates in a sterile, sealed environment and works more accurately than humans, Dr. Al-Kosaibi said. – Okaz __
