The work of the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics’ medication dispensing robot begins early.

At 6 a.m., the machine starts sorting the medication that will be delivered to patients around the hospital. By the end of a day it will have sorted and packaged around 3,500 doses.

“Robots show up for work, they don’t ask for much except a little compressed air, and they do their job,” said Steve Nelson, the interim director of the UIHC Pharmaceutical Care.

Now, after the current medication-dispensing robot has served UIHC for nearly a decade, it will soon be replaced by a faster, more efficient model.

The UIHC purchased the McKesson ROBOT-Rx system earlier this week for $1.2 million. The new robot is not just a replacement, it is an upgrade able to sort almost twice the number of medications as its predecessor.

Pharmacy technicians load medicine into the machine, which then packages and sorts the pills. This eliminates what would be a tedious task for the department’s employees, said Trisha Smith, Pharmaceutical Care’s assistant director of centralized services and financial management.

After the robot sorts and packages medications, they are matched to the appropriate patient through a bar code present on both the medication and the patient’s wrist band. This ensures the patient always receives the correct medication.

Since its installation in 2001, the robot has only broken down a handful of times, Smith said. The company that sells the machine also provides a technician to do preventative maintenance and repairs.

“It takes a lot of additional work when it happens, but it doesn’t happen that frequently,” she said.

The UIHC is not the first hospital in Iowa to get a McKesson robot. In May of 2009, the Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids bought a McKesson model along with several other advances to automate its system.

This has freed up pharmacists to serve as consultants and allowed them to work more directly with patients, said Desmond Waters, the director of the pharmacy at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids.

“It’s pretty much transformed our practice,” he said. “It’s really allowed us to get our pharmacists out of the pharmacy and onto patient-care floors.”

But aside from just being efficient, the robots also increase security, record keeping, and tracking of the medication, said Terry Witkowski, the executive officer for the Iowa Board of Pharmacy. Which is one reason that the majority of hospitals, regardless of their size, have been using it, Witowski said.

For many hospitals, it was more of a patient-care issue than a cost-saving or efficiency issue, she said.

For UIHC, the robot helps pharmacists address more patient needs and concerns, said UIHC spokesman Tom Moore.

“Our highest priority is patient safety, and the pharmacy robot contributes to enhancing patient safety because of its high degree of accuracy,” he said.

But even though the machine is painstakingly precise, it doesn’t mean that it will not be monitored.

The new machine will be installed by the end of this winter, and for the first 60 days of its operation, all medication will be checked to make sure everything is working correctly, Nelson said.

“Pharmacy is a very tightly regulated profession,” he said. “There’s no room for errors.”