Health Robotics' i.v.STATION robot wins the Area Science Park 3L 3T Innovation Award

Oct 12 2009

Health Robotics today announced the manufacturing, shipment, and subsequent field installation of the first five i.v.STATION post-prototype robots in the United States of America and in Spain within the September to November timeframe this year; concurrently, Health Robotics also made the announcement of its i.v.STATION robot's winning of the Area Science Park 3L 3T Innovation Award, which is given to the best technology product across all industries.

i.v.STATION represents a revolutionary approach in the quest for safe, accurate, efficient, and cost effective intravenous and ready-to-administer patient doses. It offers unprecedented reduction of medication errors, ISO compliant accuracy, sterility, and clinician labor savings, all within a scalable, cost-effective, distributed, and fail-safe architecture. The first 5 of 20 i.v.STATION installations are scheduled to begin at selected installations in Spain and the United States of America within the next four to five weeks.

During the ceremony celebrating the 3L 3T Innovation Award, Paolo Giribona, Director of Research of Development for Health Robotics stated: "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." For a transcript of the entire Q&A session with Paolo Giribona during the Award ceremony, please visit: http://www.health-robotics.com/en/about-health-robotics/executive-interviews/

The primary challenges in today's IV Admixture operations are serious medication errors such as drug exchange and accuracy mistakes, high costs, life-critical turn-around time, intravenous drugs waste, regulatory issues, and difficulty in maintaining adequately trained clinical staff. i.v.STATION automatically and aseptically compounds non-hazardous IV doses and dispenses them to clinical staff in a ready-to-administer patient formats for antibiotics, pain therapy, anti-virals, epidurals, and other IVs and injectable medications. i.v.STATION was designed to address the above-mentioned industry-challenges, and to overcome the fact that until now, the range of products and technology available to mitigate these widespread industry patient safety and financial problems has consisted of variations on the IV "piggyback" bag, outsourcing of IVs, and 1990s-developed automated "solutions" that have seen little or no adoption and success over the past twenty years.

"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 [wards] and satellite pharmacies, as close as we can get to the patients. I feel bad for all of our 9 American beta test customers that have suffered delays solely due to the ill advised and frivolous litigation threats to their institutions by the distributor we terminated for cause in North America. We are nevertheless proceeding with installations at some of these 9 hospitals this month, while we will have no other choice but to substitute some of these 9 beta sites with other American hospitals, as solely decided by these 9 beta site hospitals on a case-by-case basis, based on their response to the litigation threats frivolously made against them by Devon Robotics. I also hope to announce our new partnership in North America for i.v.STATION over the next few weeks, but in any event before the ASHP Mid Year symposium in Las Vegas." stated Werner Rainer, Health Robotics' CEO.