Health Robotics introduces Virtual High-Availability Architecture for CytoCare and i.v.STATION robots

Apr 7 2010

As part of its I.V. Room of the Future initiative to cooperate with other industry leaders, Health Robotics today announced the immediate availability of its revolutionary Virtual High-Availability Architecture (up to 99.99%), including state-of-the-art, virtualization compliant, cluster and fail-over, disaster recovery, and back-up solutions for its CytoCare and i.v.STATION robots [with future expansion to TPNstation when available], and its i.v.SOFT Workflow Engine for manual compounding, all of this at a fraction of the cost of competitors' obsolete and uncertain robotic designs that lack back-up and redundancy features despite their much higher cost of ownership.

"Once again Health Robotics pioneers a new concept in I.V. Automation and Robotics: the certainty that Hospital Pharmacists no longer have to scramble to find pharmacy technicians to urgently go back to Laminar Airflow Hoods (LAFs) and try remember how to compound I.V. Admixtures in emergency situations due to planned maintenance, computer upgrades, regular cleaning and sterilization procedures, or unplanned downtime. This revolutionary solution is available to our customers as an extra option, either on Health Robotics' supplied Intel-based servers or on customers' centrally managed Virtual Machines. We believe that total redundancy and life-critical risk reduction should be requirements to the I.V. Room of the Future", stated Werner Rainer, Health Robotics' CEO.

Virtualization is an irreversible process already initiated by many of the top-rated medical centers around the world, and it should be much more so when it comes to life-critical I.V. Admixtures. Health Robotics decided to engineer this concept as an additional option for our global customers and therefore safeguard their investments in I.V. Automation, providing full support for the implementation of our core technology on all major virtual environments. The Virtual High-Availability Architecture takes advantage of all the security measures already set in place by our customers, adapting our architecture, robotics and software solutions and implementation approaches to the customers' needs and not vice versa. Health Robotics' core technology can be deployed on multiple configurations, ranging from one active node and a stand-by node, to active/passive clustered nodes with a remote disaster-recovery stand-by node. Thanks to its I.V. Room of the Future strategic alliance with MEDarchiver srl, a member of the Oracle(TM) partner network, Health Robotics is now able to implement its exclusive rule-based, intelligent routing process, on the outstanding and industry leading Oracle(TM) Database.

"We tailor our Virtual High-Availability Architecture to each customer's needs, where all the nodes representing an 'actor' in the I.V. Admixtures workflow are planned for, such as the robots, the LAFs' manual [computer assisted] compounding workstations, and the system interfaces with third party information systems. All the single points of failure are taken into account, adding backup robot units and workstations to address potential computer failures, but also considering the need for a centralized database system and communication management tools, guaranteeing transparent fail-over for the entire I.V. Workflow. To our customers, this means not only the ability to manage spare or redundant nodes and hardware components like an additional robot or workstation, but also the flexibility to detect any failure in the virtual network and automatically initiate a recovery procedure, for example re-routing pending I.V. Admixtures jobs to the most appropriate available resource (robots or i.v.SOFT-assisted LAF), including production load balancing", stated Fabio Fioravanti, Health Robotics' Director of Software Development.