Who is Baxa?

Baxa Corporation was founded to focus on the needs of hospital pharmacists – from the pharmaceutical company to the patient, by facilitating the handling, packaging and administration of liquid medications.

Our founders knew from the start that our first product – the Exacta-Med® Oral Dispenser – was not going to be the only product Baxa would provide. To build the business, they spent time with pharmacists and technicians, really listening to their ideas and their problems. Over time, we realized that the health-system pharmacy community needed a company that would listen to their needs and problems and focus on finding solutions to make it easier to handle, package, and administer medications. That became the core of our business.

Why did Baxa choose to work in the area of liquid medications?

One of the things that is unique about Baxa is that the company was organized with the principle that it would focus on the hospital pharmacy from day one. Brian Baldwin and Ron Baxa both felt that there was an opportunity to serve the increasing need to develop for systems for enabling unit dose medication in hospital pharmacy. Unit dose was a concept that started out in the 1960’s and was coming on strong in the 1970’s.

We started with oral drugs because we were lucky enough to learn about a real unmet need there. The genesis of the company was a phone call to Ron Baxa from a Director of Pharmacy at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. That Director had learned of unpublicized, devastating accidents due to wrong route administration of an oral liquid medication unit dosed with a hypodermic syringe. He felt the risk of misconnections was an unacceptable situation.

Even with an oral label, the use of luer or hypodermic syringes could lead to an inadvertent wrong route administration of an oral medication into an IV site. That phone call led to the development of the oral dispensers and to providing them to leading children’s hospitals to safely unit dose their oral liquids. We quickly developed different filling adapters and accessories to build a whole oral liquid drug delivery system.

What makes Baxa different?

We are in this business for the long haul. We’re a long-time partner who wants to serve the pharmacy today, tomorrow and twenty years from now. I think some things are very different about us from other companies. Our sales force is motivated on long-term objectives and long-term relationships with the customers. They’re not commissioned on individual sales. We want people to see us as their partners and value our long-term relationships.

What do you see as the key trends for hospital pharmacies and the healthcare community?

I think that the pharmacy is changing, but I really see the people in the pharmacy as the core of the drug handling and distribution system in any hospital. But the role is certainly expanding. We spend more time with nursing now than we have in the past. The pharmacy still is the central point where medications enter the hospital and must be properly handled, packaged and distributed.

The trend today is towards more prepared doses, more things ready-to-use. Baxa is diligently mining the counter trend…supporting the people who want to buy drugs in bulk and less-expensive forms and do more patient-specific mixing themselves. We provide the tools to do this safely and efficiently. At the end of the day, patient-specific doses usually are clinically better for patients, eliminating excess fluid and providing a more customized approach to their treatment.


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