BD, Wellstar connect pharmacy-to-bedside medication management with AI

BD, the global medical technology company, has announced a partnership with Wellstar, the non-profit healthcare provider in Georgia to bring AI-enabled medication management across Wellstar’s hospitals and care facilities.

The collaboration combines BD’s Pyxis Pro medication dispensing technologies with BD Alaris Infusion Systems, with BD Incada adding AI-enabled analytics and natural-language querying for enterprise medication inventory. BD says the system can give Wellstar real-time visibility into medication availability, customizable dashboards and on-demand inventory insights. Separately, Alaris EMR Interoperability allows clinicians to use barcode scanning to send infusion orders from the electronic medical record to the infusion system and receive infusion status updates back into the EMR.

“Wellstar uses advanced technologies, including the AI-powered tools by BD, to supercharge our team members’ ability to deliver the highest levels of clinical care, safety, quality and patient experience,” said Susan Wright, Pharm.D., vice president of pharmacy services at Wellstar Health, over email. Wright said accuracy depends on team members’ critical thinking, local oversight and decision-making, supported by validation layers such as medication barcode scanning, EMR cross-checks and other system controls. “We also monitor for metrics relative to Incada’s performance and keep a close eye on improving medication safety outcomes,” she added.

Medication management remains labor-intensive for hospitals. For instance, hospital labor costs tied to managing drug shortages nearly tripled between 2019 and 2024, rising from $359 million to $894 million, according to Vizient, a healthcare performance improvement company.

Incada’s natural-language interface works differently from a general-purpose large language model because it translates questions into structured queries against governed hospital data. Because the system is querying hospital inventory and operational data, BD designed multiple validation layers between the user’s question and the answer it returns.

“The BD Incada natural language query is a layered system where a large language model translates user questions into structured queries using a governed semantic layer that maps business terms to data,” said Omar Ahmed, SVP R&D, Connected Care Segment at BD. “The system then validates those queries through schema checks, access controls, and rule-based or statistical guardrails before execution.” Ahmed added that the company uses further training and safety guardrails to ensure that the plain-language answers delivered to users are precise and reliable.

That layered validation architecture also reflects a regulatory boundary BD is trying to preserve. The company is positioning Incada first around operational data, inventory and workflow optimization, while avoiding patient-specific recommendations that could push the system toward clinical decision support subject to FDA medical-device oversight.

Ahmed said BD is focusing first on operational data, specifically inventory and workflow optimization, where insights are descriptive rather than patient-specific. Clinical decision support is more tightly controlled, he noted, because software functions that influence patient care decisions can fall under FDA medical-device oversight. “BD will draw a clear boundary by avoiding patient-level recommendations, requiring human oversight, and limiting early use cases to informational insights rather than prescriptive clinical guidance,” Ahmed said.

Wellstar also contributes to the Strategic Development Council for BD’s Medication Management Solutions business, where Wellstar executives share expertise across enterprise pharmacy operations, medication safety, nursing, and informatics.

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Filed Under: Drug Delivery
Tagged With: BD, Wellstar
 

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