Founded in 1980, Bumrungrad International Hospital was the first hospital in Asia to receive accreditation from the Joint Commission International. It serves over 1 million patients annually, including patients from about 190 countries! The cost of treatment is said to be about 1/8 of the cost of similar treatment in the United States. The hospital has about 100 pharmacists and 75 pharmacy technicians, offering various services, such as oncology pharmacy, medication therapy management (MTM), drug information service (DIS), and an anticoagulation clinic.
We toured the inpatient dispensing pharmacy, featuring a PillPick robot (an automated packaging and dispensing system that uses barcodes to scan each medication). The robot houses about 650 medications, only 20% of all the medications the hospital carries. One of the pharmacists explained that the robot is ~99% accurate. After integrating the robot into the pharmacy, medication errors due to the filling process were reduced by about 80%! Once the robot fills the medications for each patient, it prints a label with the patient's name, room number, medications, and administration times, and attaches them on a plastic ring, as Maura is demonstrating below:
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