NORWALK -- He's big, fast and accurate, but his co-workers aren't jealous. To them, SAM is the man.

SAM, in fact, is a robot that dispenses drugs for patients at Norwalk Hospital, and does it much faster than the pharmacists did.

Most patients receive medication from hospital pharmacists, either as a result of the illness that prompted their visit or to supplement the drugs previously prescribed to them.

In the past, pharmacy staff spent a combined 26 hours daily learning what drugs were needed -- which required extracting scientific names from patients, their physicians or other pharmacists -- and then assembling and delivering the drugs to about 200 patients. SAM does this in four hours.

But SAM's co-workers don't simply marvel at his speed. As his name -- Safely Administering Medication -- suggests, Norwalk Hospital invested heavily in the robot to increase patient safety.

"It's not some gee-whiz, 'Star Wars' thing," said Robert Bepko, administrative director for corporate pharmacy services. "We want to make sure the right patients get the right medication every time."

SAM -- its technical name is the McKesson Robot RX -- occupies most of a corner of a room in the pharmacy department.

The robot is mainly an agile, mechanical arm protruding from a pole in the center of an octagon. On the walls of the octagon, within reach of the robotic arm, are hundreds of individually wrapped pieces of medicine, hanging from metal pins.

Each "robot ready package," as the pieces of medication are called, have bar codes, allowing SAM to decipher one from the other.

"Everything, from antibiotics to steroids," Bepko said. "You name it, it's in there."

When SAM gets an order -- transmitted from a pharmacist or physician in another part of the hospital -- it locates the drugs, pulls them off the wall and drops them in an envelope or bin. Pharmacists verify the orders, and the drugs are sent to patients.

"It's more accurate, and faster," said Greg Sheehan, a pharmacy technician.

The robot has freed pharmacists from the timely, mundane work of dispensing medication, and enables them to spend more time interviewing patients, making IV bags and ensuring that the drugs which patients need and those which they were previously taking are compatible, hospital officials said.

Hospitals were recently required to make IV bags -- Norwalk made 18,000 last month -- and reconcile patients' medications. The added responsibility of meeting the new requirements pushed Bepko to ask the hospital's board of trustees in 2004 to purchase the robot. "I said, 'We need automation,'" he said.

Nationwide, about 7,000 patients die yearly from medication errors, Bepko said, adding, "and we don't want that to happen at Norwalk Hospital."

The board agreed and McKesson, a San Francisco-based supplier of health-care products, began constructing the robot in the pharmacy department last January.

The department floor rests atop granite -- it is built into Hospital Hill -- and can hold the weight of the robot.

SAM began working last June, and dispenses about 5,500 doses daily. It also takes inventory of the drugs within its reach and tells the pharmacists how to stock it.

The hospital's contract with McKesson prohibits it from disclosing the cost of the robot, though Bepko said it was at least $1 million.

While the technology embodied in SAM is not new -- the automobile industry has used it for 15 years -- the costliness of employing it is why the health-care industry is just catching on, hospital officials said.

Nationwide, about 3,000 hospitals are using automated medication-dispensing machines. In Connecticut, only Norwalk Hospital and Shelton's Griffin Hospital are using the robots.

Copyright 2006, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.

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