Background All hospitals have been required to consider medication safety since the decree of 6 April 2011. The preparation of drugs to be administered (PDA) is a crucial step.

The Compiegne Noyon Hospital chose to automate this PDA for oral forms with a robot; oral drugs are first removed from blister packs.

Automation is an expensive process.

Purpose To evaluate the cost of a bag produced by the robot (production bag), drugs excluded, and to break down the overall cost into components.

Materials and methods For the study, included into the cost of a production bag were: human and material resources, equipment maintenance and supplies which are used for the preliminary stages of production, for the production itself and for the development process.

The various factors included into the cost of a bag were:

• – Material resources (amortisation rate over 5 years): the automaton (robot), the interface between prescription and automation software, the manual deblistering.

• – Supplies: ink rollers and plastic rollers.

• – Equipment maintenance: hot line, maintenance and cleaning of the robot

• – Human resources: agents required for picking and removal from blister packs, for checking removal from blister packs, for automated production and for process optimisation.

Results The average cost of an automatically-produced bag is 0.10 €.

The cost is broken down as follows:

• − 63% for human resources with:

  • 40% production

  • 17% deblistering

  • 2% picking

  • 1.5% deblistering checking

  • 2.5% process optimisation

• − 20% for supplies

• − 16.3% for equipment,

• − 0.7% for maintenance

Conclusions Despite the significant cost of automated PDA, this process is the safest way of caring for hospitalised patients.

These results show that human resources are the most expensive part of the cost of a production bag. The 40% production cost cannot be reduced, although the 17% cost of removal from blister packs could be reduced if we bought a semi-automatic deblistering machine or if all drugs were bought in bulk packs.

No conflict of interest.