A Lot To Rave About RIVA
When a robot prepares your syringes and bags in a sterile environment, it’s not only reducing the time needed to do so, it also reduces the probability of contamination or even life-threatening errors.
RIVA or Robotic Intravenous Automation is a robot that specializes in preparing IV syringes and bags thereby introducing the benefits of automation and increasing accuracy. Developed by Intelligent Hospital Systems Inc. (IH Systems) and a product of intensive research that started way back in the mid-90’s, RIVA provides numerous benefits.
Since RIVA prepares everything inside a sterile enclosure, it reduces the probability of mixing contaminated drugs. Also, since all pertinent data such as expiry dates, doses, labels, volume, concentration, even the weights of the vials and the size of the syringes are scanned and accurately processed during preparation, you’ll know that all the necessary requirements have been taken into consideration.
All these tasks can be done efficiently by a human pharmacist. However, after many hours of work and the onset of stress, the chances of errors can slowly creep in. RIVA will not get tired; neither will it lose focus. As such, these factors are totally eliminated.
RIVA will benefit hospitals too. Since it is more systematic in its preparations, considering drug shelf lives, supply, as well as accurate in carrying out the preparations, just-in-time processes will be performed more frequently. This will in turn reduce costs and increase the organization’s overall efficiency.
Cases of drug-administration-gone-awry are not remote. In fact, they happen too frequently for comfort. Machines like RIVA can never replace human pharmacists, who will still have the last say as to whether a drug can be administered to patients or not. However, knowing that they are assisting the pharmacists especially in routinary tasks should be enough to keep you breathing easy.
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