The University of Kansas Health System
Kansas City, KS
The purpose of this program was to establish a pharmacy-owned, in-house 3D-printing capability for the design and fabrication of standards-based medication storage, implemented in two primary applications: modular, color-coded anesthesia workstation drawers and a redesigned rapid-sequence intubation (RSI) kit.
Point-of-care medication storage has long depended on commercial bins and dividers that are costly for their simplicity, fixed in dimension, slow to procure, and unable to adapt as formularies and shortages change. Two situations made the limits concrete: hand-replicating four identical anesthesia workstations at a regional hospital, and a look-alike hazard in the RSI kit, where succinylcholine and phenylephrine—a paralytic and a vasopressor—were indistinguishable in their amber protect-from-light bags. Recognizing that desktop 3D printing had become affordable and reliable, our pharmacy automation team secured printers in June 2024 on a cost-of-goods justification and deployed first-generation storage in October 2024 at a sixteen-operating-room hospital. Learnings drove a redesign to individual modular bins, each dimensioned to its drug product, with names embossed in ISMP Tall Man lettering and colors following ASRA-ASTM drug-class conventions that mirror the syringe labels printed in the operating room. All drug names, concentrations, and warnings are embedded directly in the plastic rather than applied as labels, yielding a cleanable surface with no sticker to peel or text to smear. For the RSI kit, a red hinged barrier bearing an embedded paralytic warning must be deliberately opened before a neuromuscular blocker can be accessed. A pharmacy-built web application converts a medication list into a visually rendered, print-ready drawer layout that stakeholders approve before anything is printed, and every design passes a governed release process: technician-led design, medication-safety quality check, and pharmacist approval.
To date, 79 of 130 anesthesia workstations have been converted, 42 validated layouts serve ten operating-room and procedural areas, and 250 RSI kits are deployed. A hazard audit of 33 incumbent drawers found shadow-board–divider mismatch in 94% and configuration instability in 88%, each resolved by a design feature of the modular-bin platform. No storage-related selection errors have been documented in converted areas, and the RSI look-alike hazard has been eliminated by physical design. Every clinical respondent in pilot feedback reported medications were easier to locate and the layout reduced the chance of selecting the wrong one. Savings on anesthesia workstation installations paid for the printers, and procurement lead time was eliminated.
During a 2026 Joint Commission survey, surveyors identified the program as a performance strength and submitted it for SAFEST recognition. The 3D-printing platform has since extended to intensive-care drawers, allergy-clinic cassettes, the blood bank, and automated dispensing cabinets, and nurse anesthetists have requested it for local ambulatory surgery centers. Most significantly, the program established a new practice model: a pharmacy technician with years of restocking experience now designs layouts with clinical teams, a second technician operates production, and the department has shifted from procurer of fixed supplies to designer and fabricator of point-of-care medication-storage interventions—a capability built on low-cost, widely available equipment that any health-system pharmacy can replicate.
A pharmacy-led 3D-printing program converted a fixed medication-storage problem into a replicable, system-wide capability for safety, standardization, and cost avoidance, demonstrating that pharmacy can be the designer of safer care rather than merely its purchaser.
Left to Right: Jacob Nelson, Lynsey Sifuentes, Josh Healy, Chris Loucks, Kevin Mahler, Scott Halvorson