Can the robot emitted from metadon to liberate the nurses and improve patient care? | United States news
toAnea George pulls the hard safety door and enters a room without windows, as the video camera appears to stare like a commercial refrigerator. The machine, which is called Body, and Whirrs and rotates before spitting seven small plastic bottles containing 70 ml specifically from metadon, which is a bright pink liquid similar to cherry cough syrup. It is used as an alternative to morphine or heroin to treat addiction.
It sweeps the bottles of the stairs, combines them with an elastic band and put them on a shelf. It was not yet 10 am, and George, the director of the nurses at Man alive, an opium therapy program – known as colloquial as the metadon clinic – in Baltimore, has already finished the doses of 100 or so who will arrive the next day. “I have changed my life and the life of our patients,” she says.
This is because filling prescriptions requires more than just pouring medicine into a bottle. This means printing and connecting stickers one by one, accurately measuring quantities, sealing bottles and disturbing hats. The spill requires the nurse to stop the work, tell the lost liquid in a bowl, measure it, record the accident and destroy the sample.
Repeat this process 100 times or more, and it is easy to know the reason, before Body arrived, the task had occupied a whole day. The pressure in keeping pace with many nurses, as well as the additional misery of the carpal tunnel syndrome, which often suffers from tensile nurses on many hats day after day, according to George.
She says about the previous clinics in which she worked: “I have seen the nurses left while the transformation and never returned.”
Now, instead of pouring doses, George spends more time interacting with patients. “It allows me to get more character, and I have more in -depth conversations,” she says. “This is where we get a lot of important information.”
Injecting humanity to treat addiction
The interaction of more patient was the idea when Amber Norbeck reached the idea of using Machine George daily. Norwek of the pharmacist in the intensive care unit for the most comprehensive at Montana Hospital said that many pregnant women there have struggled with the consequences of opioid materials to the point that up to 50 % of newborns suffered from withdrawal symptoms.
The treatment of metadon helped new mothers and mothers, but arriving under their efforts; Some of the clinics visited by a waiting list from 30 to 60 days had a three -hour lines, while the herd of the nurses in the windows of the service. Some metadon patients are required to return to clinics daily for their doses.
“It does not seem like health care, it seemed to be a cashier in a bank pouring metadon,” Norwek says. “For patients with children, jobs and life, getting the drug was so long that they would only surrender.”
Since Opium Ophthalmic deaths increased from about 8,000 in 2009 to more than 114,000 in 2022, Norwek saw a country that caught the opioid and nursing crisis. In 2019, she and Mike Bokurny, an engineer who developed his own electric motor, began in the brainstorming automation to assemble the metadon doses.
They have invented a robotic device that can be poured out, sealed, mark and covering the liquid version of the drug – its most popular forms – in seconds. A year later, Norwek left her hospital and in January 2021, the OPIO Connect Inc founded, with Norbeck as CEO and Pokorny as Vice President.
They called the device they built Zing, and they quickly gathered because it used the developed parts of other types of machines. “The current pharmacy automation solutions have not been designed to deal with the type of contrast [that dispensing methadone requires]Sam Wilson, Opening Operations Manager, says. “Thus the ingredients of Zeng existed, such as robots, pumps, signs technology, etc., no one applied them to this particular challenge.”
The mitadon rules dating back to the era of the epidemic prefer automation
Zing coincided with the rise of Covid-19, which provided a batch. Before birth, patients who considered “stable” in their treatment can receive “losses”, allowing them to pick up seven doses or even 14 doses in one visit instead of taking a daily trip to the clinic. To reduce personal contact during the closure, Federal officials relaxed the rules on the Homes, making them available to a wide range of patients and in batches for up to 28 days.
This shift in politics led to more intense preparation and pouring of the nurses, but research after the borders showed that the change caused a few problems and provided great benefits to patients, and thus the new seizure rules became permanent as of January 2024.
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By that time, the first Zing reached COMPDROG, a program for the treatment of opiates in Columbus, Ohio, with his own title: Alfie. Other seven ships that came online across the country also received a title, and the human influence made them topics of naming, birthday parties, gender parties, and Halloween dress. Together, the fleet collected more than 1 million doses of methadone.
Norbeck expects to land from 30 to 40 Zings by the end of 2025, and the company puts its eyes on 2100 clinics throughout the country as well as prisons, where it says, “Many population needs treatment, but they participate in difficult places to make nurses work.”
Automated work: taking jobs or improving employment deficiency?
Norbeck knows that Zing’s workers are not demobilized, but many clinics managed to leave open sites that are not full and direct the saved money to other treatment programs.
“There were fears of that [Zing] “He will take the jobs of the nurses, but the real task is to edit the nurses,” says Bokurny.
COMPDROG has used six nurses to pour and distribute the metadon throughout the day. Now, three of the task, with the help of Zing, and the other others who take the dates of health care remotely. All six are still on employees.
In Man Alive, Body George’s arrival gave enough time in spare time, as she also became the domestic health nurse of the clinic, as she helped patients communicate with medical care and follow up on medicines and public health care issues.
Of course, there is another aspect of those examples – nurses who have not been assigned to open holes or remote health roles or roles. These jobs may be occupied regardless of the work of the robot: health resources management projects and services a loss Of the 63,720 nurses in 2030, a number that does not pick up the accumulated attrition through the epidemic.
Norbeck believes that its field is a place in which Robot Labor can reduce work instead of creating it.
In Baltimore, the other nurse in George and Man, Mandy Scott, began holding educational events in society and attending group treatment sessions at home to communicate with patients. Simply, George says, “Body allows me to be a nurse again.”