BOZEN, Italy, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Robotics today announced the European launch of its i.v.STATION Robot with a demonstration at the European Association of Hospital Pharmacists in Barcelona, Spain [Booth 21, Level -1] next week. Health Robotics also announced an updated list of the i.v.STATION installations around the world, and the simultaneous showcase of CytoCare(TM), the world's only Chemotherapy IV Robot, at the EAHP booth of one of its strategic partners (B|Braun, Booths C9-C12).

The primary challenges in today's IV Admixture operations are serious medication errors, high costs, turn-around time, lack of sterility, wasted materials, lack of audit trails, motion injuries, space constraints and difficulty in maintaining adequate and trained staff. i.v.STATION was designed to address these issues and overcome the fact that until now, the range of products and technology available to mitigate these challenges has consisted of variations on the IV piggyback bag, outsourcing of IVs, and partial robotic solutions that have seen very limited adoption and success over the past decade. i.v.STATION represents a revolutionary approach in the quest for safe, accurate, efficient, cost effective, and ready-to-administer IV Admixtures. Constructed around a scalable, distributed, and fail-safe architecture, i.v.STATION offers unprecedented final container flexibility, life-critical patient safety, and robotic precision and performance.

Health Robotics has reached agreements for 16 i.v.STATION installations in 2009 at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (Houston), University of Southern California Hospital (Los Angeles), Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston), Ochsner Clinic (New Orleans), Fairview Children's Hospital (Minneapolis), University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), University of Colorado (Denver), and Allegiance Health (Jackson, Michigan) in the United States, plus Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (University of London, UK), King Faisal Specialist Hospital Research Centre (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Kameda Medical Center (Japan), Dubai Health Authority (UAE), Agean University Hospital (Izmir, Turkey), Tawam Hospital-a Johns Hopkins Medicine Affiliate (Abu Dhabi, UAE), Bozen Krankenhaus (Bozen, Italy) and Campus Biomedico University Hospital (Rome, Italy) in the rest of the world, with 4 additional sites to be announced next month.

i.v.STATION may be deployed in a variety of locations, including central and satellite pharmacies and direct patient care areas, due to its self-contained form, ISO Class 5 environment, and small foot print. Pharmacies may, for the first time, choose a robotic configuration that suits their needs, rather than being forced into the dated alternative of one-size-fits-all, million-dollar-plus robots. Whether a Pharmacy chooses single or multiple i.v.STATION configurations, it will benefit from fully automated compounding while producing its ready-to-administer IV doses in a variety of syringe, bag, vial, and tamper-evident caps from many medical suppliers including Baxter, B|Braun, Beckton Dickinson, Hospira, IMF, Covidien, and Terumo. Furthermore, i.v.STATION supports just-in-time IV filling to reduce urgent turn-around-time issues of life-critical patients while avoiding premium prices associated with pre-filled bags and syringes and high cost closed-system-transfer devices, which are all made obsolete by the i.v.STATION technology.

The strategic partnerships for i.v.STATION between Health Robotics and Devon International Group, AHCSC, TOSHO, and Can-Med are quickly paying off as evidenced by the recent addition of several renowned American and European hospitals to the 2009 i.v.STATION installations previously announced at ASHP in December 2008. I am very pleased with the prestige and diversity of the hospital pharmacists that have chosen to partner with Health Robotics. After developing the only existing Chemotherapy IV Robot [CytoCare], we have now leapfrogged the competition in non-hazardous IV Robotics as well. I look forward to meeting some of these pharmacists at Barcelona, where Gaspar DeViedma, one of the two architects behind i.v.STATION will demonstrate the new robot's features and benefits. The upcoming i.v.STATION global installations represent a great mix of hospitals [academic and community, general and oncology, adult and pediatric] and even a centralized compounding service stated Werner Rainer, Health Robotics' CEO.

On the heels of the ASHP kick-off in North America, this European launch is a testament to Health Robotics defying the conventional wisdom that a start-up technology company in the healthcare sector cannot leave its competitors behind since its genesis 2 years ago. Health Robotics intends to complete its i.v.STATION strategic partners' line-up after the conclusion of demonstrations to multiple healthcare companies in Europe, Oceania, and Latin America, some of which will take place during the EAHP Congress in Barcelona. The 20 global Beta installations will be key in assuring that Health Robotics can deliver a mature, feature-rich, flexible, and cost-effective product to the more than nine hundred i.v.STATION purchase orders the company has already registered from all over the world.

About Health Robotics:

Health Robotics is the global leading supplier of life-critical intra-venous medication preparation, compounding, and dispensing Robots, with forty-five-times more units sold that all of its competitors combined, and providing healthcare facilities in 4 continents with robotics technology and software automation solutions. The world-leading solutions CytoCare [hazardous IVs] and i.v.STATION [non-hazardous IVs] have and will greatly contribute to ease global hospitals' clinics' growing pressures to improve patient safety through the effective and efficient production of sterile, accurate, and ready-to-administer IVs, to decrease life-threatening medication errors and contamination risks, and to work more efficiently, increase throughput, reduce waste, and contain spiraling costs.

For additional information, please contact: Health Robotics Gaspar G. DeViedma Altmanstrasse 9A, Bozen, Sud-Tyrol, I-39100 USA: +1-(609)-980-7976 EUROPE: +39-(346)-963-4934 gaspar.deviedma@health-robotics.com

For additional information, please contact: Health Robotics, Gaspar G. DeViedma, Altmanstrasse 9A, Bozen, Sud-Tyrol, I-39100, USA: +1-(609)-980-7976, EUROPE: +39-(346) 963-4934, gaspar.deviedma@health-robotics.com