Pharmacy Purchasing & Products would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in this year’s State of Pharmacy Automation survey. Last month’s survey issue was the largest, most comprehensive results issue ever! We aim to continuously improve on the quality and depth of market research into institutional pharmacy practices, and look forward to providing that information back to you. 

With this in mind, we hope you will keep this year’s survey results close at hand throughout the year to come, as it is chock full of quality automation solutions to help you achieve your medication safety and workflow efficiency goals. One of the greatest benefits of this data is that you can benchmark your practice against other similar facilities, or against institutional pharmacy practice as a whole. In any case, this provides valuable leverage for your own improvement initiatives.

After tabulating the significant amount of feedback we received on the survey, the highest-rated product classes were as follows:

1. ADCs
2. Carousels/Robots
3. Automated Compounding Devices
4. Outsourced Repackaging Vendors
5. Physician Order Imaging Systems

Hospital pharmacy directors are most satisfied with their automated dispensing cabinets among all other automation types displacing carousel and robot storage, which led the field last year. Physician order imaging systems were new to the top five this year, replacing compounding robots.

In order to take full advantage of the State of Pharmacy Automation data, PP&P is once again making selected charts available as PowerPoint slides on our Web site. These can be used in your own presentations, whether they be to colleagues in educational settings or to your own administration to augment acquisition proposals. We want this data to work for you, so please take advantage of this service available to all subscribers.

All the best,

R. Mitchell Halvorsen
Publisher

P.S. PP&P would like to congratulate Joe Cirillo, RPh, as the randomly selected grand prize winner of our recent survey of hospital pharmacy directors. Joe, pharmacy director at the Central New York Psychiatric Center in Marcy, New York, was selected from among all those who filled out the survey on generic drugs and will receive an 8 GB iPod Touch as his prize! We extend our thanks to Joe and everyone else who completed this successful survey. As always, your participation helps raise awareness and garners valuable market data that allows us to bring you better, more focused content. Please continue to participate in surveys from PP&P and you could be our next big winner!