The hospital is part of the St. Joseph Health System in Southern California, a group of 13 hospitals located in Northern and Southern California, Texas, and New Mexico.
The Health System is preparing for patient bedside bar coding, and St. Mary's will deploy Talyst's AutoPack™ and AutoLabel® in its pharmacy as the hospital begins its bar-code medication administration (BCMA) initiatives.
AutoPack enables automated dispensing of up to 500 different oral solid medication types, delivering unit-dose or multiple-dose packages in a compact footprint. It is designed to provide 19 lines of user-defined label space.
The AutoLabel system (shown) applies bar-coded labels to containers, using a patent-pending transfer label to ensure that medications are both easy to and human-readable.
"Our Medical Center is preparing for a strong bedside bar-coding initiative to give our patients the best care," says Vanbotra Huang, St. Mary's director of pharmacy. "Talyst's successful bar-coding technology lets us achieve our goals of reducing medication errors and improving patient safety."
"Bar-coding initiatives confirm the right medication gets to the right patient, at the right time, and in the right dose," says Carla Corkern, Talyst's CEO. "Our bar-coding technology ensures virtually 100 percent of the medications leaving [the] pharmacy are scan-ready at the bedside."
Established in 1956, St. Mary Medical Center is a 194-bed acute care hospital that includes the Academy of Heart Care Excellence. The Medical Center also serves as the designated STEMI receiving center for north San Bernardino County.
Talyst notes that as of 2010, it had installed automated systems in more than 500 acute-care hospitals, integrated healthcare companies, long-term care facilities, and correctional institutions. Its AutoPharm® software platform is designed to drive a complete suite of medication storage, packaging, refrigeration, and bar-coding hardware.
