How does Baxa support the work of hospital pharmacies?

I like to think of the pharmacy as a kitchen. Baxa is like the Cuisinart for the pharmacy. Some big companies out there that are like Ore Ida or Stouffer’s Frozen Food, making prepared, ready-to-use, packaged food. Baxa, however, enables pharmacists to apply their specialty knowledge and experience to prepare more customized doses and to deliver those medications more safely.

For example, a pre-filled cup is something that the nurse has to open. The patient is lying down and they wonder how they will get the dose into the patient. Filling a hypodermic syringe from the cup of oral liquid can result in a med error. It’s never a good idea to have an oral medication in a luer syringe next to a patient that has an IV site. So we encourage people to fill oral liquids in the pharmacy in a unit dose oral dispenser…that is something that we really believe in.

Another example is with the mixing of patient-specific Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN). Baxa has a state-of-the-art system to automate that. You can outsource TPN to a company that will mix your patient-specific bags for you. That is like getting take-out food, to use the kitchen analogy. The pharmacy loses control and is not flexible for handling last-minute orders or order changes. And, any time you order out or buy prepared food it is always more expensive than if you buy all the ingredients fresh and make your own meal.

We recognize that the central challenge for our customers is to have a fully trained staff able to do the preparation and to have a quality system that meets or exceeds the requirements of USP <797>. We are responding to that challenge by providing better and better tools to automate the processes in the pharmacy that handle packaging and by offering systems that save time and labor for the pharmacy. We also have created the STAR Center® for training on how to comply with USP <797> and making that compliance stick.



What is Baxa Corporation’s roadmap and where do you see the company in five years?

The five-year plan for Baxa calls for growth in each of our three business lines: Oral and Enteral Systems, Pharmacy Admixture Tools and Automated Compounding Devices. Size-wise, we think that means we’ll be about twice as big of a company in that time frame. We expect that to add innovative products that improve the safety of handling hazardous drugs in a closed system. We also are planning to introduce products to improve the maintenance of catheters through an innovative alternative to flushing with syringes. We certainly expect to continue to improve our technology for pumping and precisely measuring liquid medication.

What drives Baxa Corporation’s success?

Our success is a direct reflection of the trust and partnership given to us by our customers. It was a future customer’s suggestion that sparked the creation of the company. Customers pushed us to build a TPN compounder after seeing our early models of the Repeater™ Pump in action. And customers suggested to us that moving from pre-mixed or ready-to-use small-volume intermittent drugs to administering syringes compounded in the pharmacy could save a tremendous amount of money. We know our future lies in listening to customers and responding with innovative solutions to the ideas and problems they present.

How does that translate into customer benefit?

Customers tell us all the time that Baxa is a special company due to our focus on the handling, packaging and administration of medications. They tell us that we have helped them make concrete improvements in productivity and reduced the potential for devastating medication errors to happen. That focus is our key customer benefit, what defines our business and what makes Baxa, Baxa.


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