It looks like a scene out of The Jetsons.
The hissing and whooshing sounds of "the robot" greet visitors to Memorial Medical Center's pharmacy department.
It's almost the end of 2010 - not 2062, when George Jetson and Jane, his wife, used a robot named Rosie in the 1960-era Hanna-Barbera cartoon to make life easier inside their home.
At Memorial, workers load jugs of pills into one end of their stationary robot - nicknamed "Rosie" - to make life safer for patients in the 21stt century.
The robot - actually two robots, with the other nicknamed "Bob" - is a huge contraption that uses pneumatic arms and computer technology to automatically sort, label, package and dispense almost all medicines for inpatients.
Costing $1.5 million, the Swisslog PillPicker and BoxPicker systems went into service in May, replacing a largely manual system of dispensing 300,000 doses of medicine each month at the Springfield hospital.
The custom-built robot is designed to reduce the risk of potentially deadly medical errors, a major concern at hospitals and other health-care providers nationwide.
The move to a centralized, all-automated system, one of only 20 to 30 like it in North America, dovetails with another big safety-related project at Memorial: conversion to all-electronic medical records.
"Safety is 'job one,'" said Chuck Callahan, vice president of operations for Memorial's parent organization, Memorial Health System.
Fewer mistakes
Under the old system, doctors' orders for medicines were filled by pharmacists and pharmacy technicians using bins and drawers filled with medicines in the pharmacy department and in satellite locations elsewhere in the hospital.
The Swisslog equipment individually packages, organizes and stores more than 17,000 pills at a time and then assembles them, based on doctors' orders, on a plastic ring, with the medicines in alphabetical order based on their generic names.
The rings with the sealed baggies are shipped by cart or pneumatic tube to nursing units, where nurses give the medicine to patients based on what is ordered in their electronic medical records.
The automation gives humans fewer opportunities to make mistakes in the type and dosage of medicine, Callahan said. The new system also reduces the need for a nurse to rummage through a medicine drawer.
"I would rather have a nurse in the room talking to the patient rather than spending five or 10 minutes looking through a pile of meds to find the one pill they need," he said. "We think that's about better care, better service to the patients. I think the technology gets the people in the right places to do the important work."
Cuts costs, too
The new system was an adjustment for nurses, but is working well, said Alisa Groesch, director of the hospital's 100-employee pharmacy department.
Nurses will notice even more of a benefit when Memorial starts verifying medicine and doses at the bedside with bar codes on the medicine and patients' wristbands, she said.
That step, which also uses electronic medical records, will take place within the next two years, according to Callahan.
Memorial received a $659,000 grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration to cover part of the robot's cost, he said. The rest was paid by Memorial. Maintenance of the system costs another $108,000 per year.
Memorial officials believe an ongoing study will show that the new system is getting medicines to patients quicker.
Callahan said he believes the robot also is reducing the per-dose cost of dispensing medicine. The pharmacy's overnight preparation of a day's worth of medicine for patients throughout the hospital used to take three employees and now requires only one.
But the robot hasn't put anyone out of a job, Callahan said.
As new drugs come on the market and patients' needs become more complex, he said the robot is freeing up pharmacists so they can work more closely with doctors in choosing the right drugs for patients rather than "spending their time pulling medicine out of a bin."
A different study Memorial has conducted indicated the technology has reduced the pharmacy department's drug-dispensing errors to almost zero, Callahan said.
'She' multitasks
The only other system like Memorial's in Illinois is at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, according to Groesch.
St. John's Hospital isn't moving toward buying a centralized robotic dispensing system, said Ginger Ertel, director of St. John's pharmacy services. That's because St. John's officials several years ago decided to establish automated dispensing cabinets in every nursing unit, she said.
St. John's already uses bar-code verification of medicines at the bedside, she said.
To a layperson, Memorial's robot, housed in white-painted steel and glass, resembles the insides of a super-sized jukebox and vending machine.
Rosie, the section managing the pills, is 16 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet tall. Bob, the section managing larger and bulkier items, such as ointments, inhalers and syringes, is just as tall but a different size - 19½ feet by 5 feet.
Inside Rosie, individually bagged pills hang on 5,300 metal rods arranged in carousels that move and turn with spurts of compressed air.
Rosie - which is almost constantly being refilled with pills - keeps track of whether each pill is out of date or needs to be removed because of a recall. Rosie also restocks unused medicine from patients who have been discharged.
Groesch and her co-workers are serious when describing Rosie's efficiency and safeguards. Groesch does have a sense of humor, however, when it comes to this robot's inherent attributes:
"We call 'it' a 'she' because 'she' can multi-task. She can package and return and dispense, all at the same time."
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Reducing errors in health care
*Medical errors are responsible for injuries in as many as one out of every 25 hospitalized patients. An estimated 48,000 to 98,000 patients die from medical errors in the United States each year.
*Preventable health care-related injuries cost the U.S. economy from $17 billion to $29 billion annually, with health-care costs accounting for half of the expense.
*Medical errors may result in a patient inadvertently being given the wrong medicine, a clinician misreading the results of a test, or patients with ambiguous symptoms being misdiagnosed.
*One study found that just one type of error - preventable "adverse drug events" - caused one out of five injuries or deaths each year to patients in the hospitals that were studied.
*In a different study at two large hospitals, errors in ordering and administering medicines accounted for 56 percent and 34 percent, respectively, of preventable adverse drug events. Research suggests that improvements in medication-dispensing systems can be effective in reducing such errors.
Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
Photo: Ted Schurter/The State Journal-Register -- Pharmacy technician Angela Ealey inspects a container of bulk pharmaceuticals that will be loaded into the new Swisslog PillPick system at Memorial Medical Center in Springfield. The new system automatically barcodes, packages, stores and dispenses unit dose medications.
