BD has inked a technological partnership with automation provider Sinteco, aimed at pharmacy robotics. The goal is to provide European hospitals a way to automatically sort bulk shipments of blister-packed tablets, loose pills and more into individually bar-coded packs while reducing human error.
“Today, medications are primarily delivered to hospitals in packs and manually cut or packaged into individual doses to be administered to patients,” said Esteban Rossi, BD’s general manager for medication management solutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“Combined technology from Sinteco and BD will transform what was previously labour-intensive, manual work into a seamless, automated process,” Rossi said in a statement. “This improvement enables pharmacists and nurses to focus more on patient care, address staffing challenges, and provide end‑to‑end traceability that ultimately delivers better patient outcomes.”
The project also aims to offer modular and scalable platforms for hospital operations of different sizes, the companies said. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Sinteco, a division of the Italy-based Bucci Industries Group, also provides the Athena software system for tracking incoming and outgoing drug supplies, from initial shipments all the way to bedside administration, in addition to its Calypso robotics hardware.
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At the same time, BD has been developing its own artificial-intelligence-enabled dispensing platform, known as Incada, to work with its Pyxis line of medication automation systems.
The president of BD’s connected care division, Bilal Muhsin, told Fierce Medtech in an interview late last year that the goal is to provide a pharmacy system that eventually takes patient data into account—one that would link changes in vital signs to medication management and aid clinicians in monitoring for unexpected side effects as well as the body’s expected improvements.
