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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."
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
The governments of Vancover, Canada and Amsterdam, Netherlands have placed orders of 10 of these machines each presumably to placed on street corners.
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.
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.
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.
blue screen of death