We have just placed our PO for the Talyst Repackager (not carousel). Does anyone have that? We would be interested in feedback.

Name of Facility: Arnot Ogden Medical Center

City, State: Acute Care

Years as a Buyer: 7

Thought I'd check in and see how everyone is doing with their Carousel now that you have been up and running for a few months.

BTW please don't publish my comments. Thanks :)

City, State: Hospital

Years as a Buyer: 2

Also, how big are each of your hospitals?

City, State: Hospital

Years as a Buyer: 2

Our current bed capacity is 214.

Name of Facility: Providence Health Center Waco, Tx.

Years as a Buyer: 5

Ours is a 250 bed facility. We are going to use both bar code labelers and also autopak. Implementing all of this and still run a pharmacy 24/7 is proving to be very stressful. Ugh!

Name of Facility: Aspirus Wausau Hospital

City, State: community hospital

Years as a Buyer: 30

Hint to Talyst users. This company is not signed up to display at the 12th Annual Pharmacy Purchasing Networking Conference in Las Vegas this August. With all the activity and questions about their systems and products, they should be one of the first companies signed up to display. and in a large booth. How about referring them and earning your 7% for your hospital (or yourself)? Display rates increase on February 1 so the more they delay, the more it costs them.

Name of Facility: Editor-In-Chief, Pharmacy Purchasing Outlook

City, State: Newsletter

Why stop there?

CSOS workshops in the Display Area, Meditech, who hasn't signed up yet for barcoding, even to get Cardinal and McKesson to demonstrate their dispensing machines (there was a lot of discussion last year at the Forum about Pyxis) to bring their equipment to Vegas. These companies need to know they're being discussed, and what better way to clear up any questions than when we're all together?

We can write about it until we're blue in the face (is that possible?), but you guys are right IN their faces. Tell them they need to be there, not with just handouts and pamphlets, but the BIG toys. Anyone who has gone to ASHP knows what I'm talking about. They don't bring a picture of a Carousel, they bring the Carousel! The company also benefits, because instead of showing it to one or two people in a hospital, they can take on a dozen or so in one shot!

Getting them to bring a hands-on demo model of their big machines will benefit all; getting them to display on your account will get you a commission!

Talk to your reps. We've got an enormous Display Area, and we need to fill it! The worse they can say is "No", and if they do, just go to the next person above him, and keep going until their president explains why they can't demonstrate their products to the people who need to know about them.

Name of Facility: Summerdale Enterprises, Inc.

City, State: Publishing

Years as a Buyer: 30+

We are a 1157 bed hospital

Please do not publish.

Here at UK HelathCare we have been using a Talyst Carousel for about 8 months now (installed for a year). We are a 473 licensed bed facility, and the Carousel we have is a little unique. Unlike most falilities that have two Carousels, we have one gigantic one (13 feet wide, 6 feet deep, 13 feet tall).

When the Novation drug distribution contracts were up for bid a few years ago, we changed from AmerisourceBergen to Cardinal (whole different thread there). Our reason for changing was mainly for the technology that Cardinal could offer at that time compared to what ABC could.

Best thing I can say is "buyer beware" at the moment. We were one of the facilities that had the Carousel constructed when Talyst deemed the AutoPharm software unsafe for use, and it sat there as a gigantic paperweight for four months before AutoPharm 2.0 was finally released.

The training we received was pretty much a farce. Don’t get me wrong; I think hands on training is the best way to learn something, but when we had questions about something, our trainer would pop some sarcastic comment back, which got old after a while.

We use Pyxis for our ADUs. AutoPharm has some great functionality with ADUs in that stockouts automatically queue up to be picked and newly loaded meds are too. The interface does have issues though, and at the present time we are currently not using either one of these functions due to a loop in the system (pull a med for a particular station and it re-queues two minutes later and never goes away). This occurred mainly after we were upgraded to our current version of AutoPharm 2.2 (which Talyst does not remember upgrading us).

Preventative maintenance is supposed to be done every six months by a local company Talyst contracts with. However, we have never seen anyone come to service it.

Overall our experiences with Talyst have not been the greatest. The company has seen a great amount of turnover in all levels of the organization (one of the VP’s we have been working with recently has been with the company a total of 2 months). Tech support is not the best either (severely understaffed). Takes longer than it should to resolve issues.

However, if we can get our current issues resolved, which Talyst has taken interest in resolving after me had to make some threats, the system will be great and I would love to sing the praises of it.

Sorry to be long winded, but we’ve experienced a lot in the few months we have used the system. To summarize our experiences: A system that has great potential that has so far not performed to expectations and has caused a whole lot of stress on the staff.

Name of Facility: UK HealthCare Chandler Medical Center

City, State: University teaching, Cancer Center, Children's Hospital, Level 1 Trauma

Years as a Buyer: 4

Don't publish -
Our AutoPack is being delivered on Friday. My staff is freaking out. They hate change.

I will post more when it is up and running.

Name of Facility: Arnot Ogden Medical Center

City, State: Acute Care 256 beds

Years as a Buyer: 7

Please do Jennifer :)