Robots in Medicine

eberry writes "The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center will use a robot to mix intravenous medications and prepare its syringes. The robot, about the size of three refrigerators strapped together, can fill 300 syringes an hour, each with a custom dose and a bar-code label routing it to a particular patient. The robot should reduce the potential for errors and improve patient safety. The robot still needs further approval by the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy, but that should come within a month. It should be noted that five Cincinnati hospitals already use computerized pill-dispensing systems." On the other hand, reader Bobbert sends in a cautionary note: "'A group of German patients has filed a lawsuit against financially beleaguered Integrated Surgical Systems Inc., alleging that the Davis company' Robodoc surgical robot is defective and dangerous, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.' So now with robotic surgery, both the doctor and the robot can liable for damages. Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery."

Comments

Human Error and Logic

[fembots]

Will these robots "sense" possibles error in the prescription though? For instance if the doctor entered the incorrect dose, an experienced nurse might just be able to pick it up, but a robot will just do as told.

It reminds me a tail strike incident where the pilot entered the incorrect weight and the system didn't pick it up. The incident report stated that the weight/speed combination should not have been allowed by the system at all, but nobody wrote that checking code at the beginning.

Re:Human Error and Logic

[dcarey]

Will these robots "sense" possibles error in the prescription though?

I'm sorry, your question does not compute. Shall we play a game of chess?

Re:Human Error and Logic

[Nurseman]

For instance if the doctor entered the incorrect dose

I've worked with these types of machines for years, they WILL pick up these kinds of errors, but they will also give alot of false positves. Many times the doctors will order more than the maximum dose, in emergencies, in cases where the person is very sick etc. The machine will not dispense "more" than it is programed to. In these instances, I just opened it with a key, and took what I needed. Drove supervisors crazy :-). The nice things is they pick up on interactions that me, the nurse, or the MD may not even know about.

Re:Human Error and Logic

[drmike0099]

All prescriptions in a hospital are reviewed by a pharmacist before being entered into the computer system. If the hospital has computerized physician order entry, they additionally go through checking as the order is placed. Nurses still take the drug in their hand and review it before they administer it. Humans still review everything.

This replaces the very error-prone menial task of filling up vials with the appropriate dose and concentration of medicines. Assuming the system works as intended, there is absolutely nothing being lost here, only gained.

Re:Human Error and Logic

[xenocide2]

In theory, pharmacists are indespensable human elements that go over these prescriptions, ensuring that bad combinations of drugs aren't administered (some combinations of drugs have a habit of reacting in the blood stream and forming a precipitate that clogs veins and arteries, among other things). In theory, doctors are supposed to be superhumans as well, and not prescribe these combinations.

In reality, there are no super humans. Its not something the medical profession enjoys admitting. New studies of drug interactions come out regularly, and few can really keep up with the pace. If you were to test a pharmacist and a robot during a month long study, I'd expect that either the robot wins, or the pharmacist winds up being extra dilligent on behalf of the study and ties it for perfection.

You act like its impossible to program in failsafes, like nobody knows exactly how much is too much, let alone poor helpless software engineers. Certainly, lives are put at risk in both avionics and medical computing. In this case, however, one of the core duties is to check exactly for these things, which places extra emphasis on an already important task.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

The governments of Vancover, Canada and Amsterdam, Netherlands have placed orders of 10 of these machines each presumably to placed on street corners.

Just someone else to get sued

[drsmack1]

I hate frivilous lawsuits, but at least with a human doing the filling of drugs there is some common sense that can be a fail-safe. With a machine all it takes is a bug to have 300 vials of poison dealt to unsuspecting patients. Won't there still need to be human oversight?

Robots in the hospital

[Icarus1919]

Until the system is fixed so doctors and nurses don't have a constant case of jet lag from being up for different shifts every day, introducing new ways to prevent careless errors is the best way to save lives.

Eep! Imagine the barcode scenario...

[tygerstripes]

Boop...

Boop...

Brrz!
"Benzadrine. Price check on Benzadrine."

*shudders*

There's still a level of human interaction

[bwcarty]

From what I read, the robots don't administer the injections.

Having been through chemo, I know that the first thing the nurse did each time was show me each of the syringes that were to be injected into my IV. Each was labelled with the medicine name and dosage.

I never saw the syringes being filled, but since I'm still alive, I trust that there's some degree of verification before I even saw the bag that contained all my chemo meds. For all I know, a robot could've mixed the meds, and I'd be none the wiser.

Fear is part of the problem

[paranode]

People just don't like to trust machines. Some of this is for good reason, but all faults in machines lead back to human error. If humans incorrectly filled, say for example, 200 prescriptions a year and ended up killing 10 people it would be bad and maybe some people would get sued and some folks would lose their licenses. If a machine made one mistake in the course of years that resulted in a death, we'd have everyone up in arms talking about how this could have been prevented and that we're letting people die at the hands of evil machines and then we'd have a battery of laws passed against machines. Unfortunately this sense of losing control takes over people and fear kicks in, even if the machine is 100 times more accurate than a human at the same task.

Brings a whole new meaning to...

[Message Board]

blue screen of death

I don't know why the scientists keep building them

[stratjakt]

This is a deliberate setup.

They eat old people's medicine for fuel. And when they grab you in their metal claws, you can't escape because they're made of metal.