NH hospitals go high tech to secure drugs

Denis Fortier is Director of Pharmacy at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene. When he started in the field 30 years ago, that job involved loading carts with Dixie cups full of prescriptions. Today, it involves managing $250,000 worth of technology called automatic dispensing machines. They look more like Zerox machines than ATMs. Cheshire has 15 of them throughout the hospital, each loaded with hundreds of different medicines. These are common fixtures at hospitals across the state. Doctors enter in prescriptions through a computer. Then nurses and other medical staff use the machines, which are sometimes called cabinets, to access the drugs.