Pharmacies are getting busier, and people are ordering in robots to deal with the workload. In a typical set up, a human pharmacist might have a robot assistant doing their grunt work while they do the talking with the customers. It may sound like something out of the Jetsons but robot pharmacists are a growing trend. It’s even possible you have already been served by a robot in your local pharmacy but just don’t know it. You may just not have seen it in action if your friendly neighborhood pharmacy robot happens to work behind the counter.

The Facts: What You Need to Know About Robot Pharmacists

• Like their human counterparts, robot pharmacists simply do what the doctor ordered– they fill prescriptions and dole out drugs.

• Robots are mostly useful for large pharmacy chains. Pharmacies buy drugs in bulk rather then pre-mixed because they are cheaper that way. Normally human pharmacists mix the drugs according to prescriptions. This is where robots come in. With robot pharmacists, the picking, sorting and mixing is all automated.

• Pharmacies expect that their robot employees will save them time. With the bots counting, bottling, and labelling prescriptions, they promise to shorten the time it takes to fill an order, sometimes by a few hours. It helps that robots don’t have to take coffee breaks!

• It is also expected that robots in pharmacies will reduce errors in dispensing prescriptions. As an example, one of the robot pharmacist models being sold has an error rate of 1 in 10,000.

Myths about Robot Pharmacists

• Despite the picture in your head, disappointingly, robot pharmacists don’t much look like R2D2 or CP30 or act like humans. They are much more likely to look like large machines, much like the automated ones in factories. The robots work with a barcode system. Prescriptions are translated into barcodes which the robot reads. It then grabs a bottle, fills it with the drug in the code, and then prints up a label with patient instructions.

• Robots in pharmacies won’t be taking away human jobs. In fact, real live pharmacists who have worked with the robots now say that they don’t know how they worked without them. With the robots taking care of repetitive tasks like picking, sorting, measuring and stocking, pharmacists are free to spend more time doing what they are trained to do—spending time with customers and counselling them in healthcare.

• Some people think drug companies are pushing for more robots in pharmacies because they would like to see drugs dispensed more freely in general. They see robotic pharmacies as a kind of “vending machine approach” to drugs. They believe that, along with pushing over-the-counter drugs is a step closer to bypassing doctors altogether. The truth? This view seems a bit extreme. Doctors as well as human pharmacists are unlikely to be out of a job soon, even given that artificial intelligence doctors are now being rolled out in the same way robot pharmacists are being rolled out.

This Article is written by Lena Butler, contributor of Health & Drug Testing Information Center.

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Posted under Health Technology
Tags: Artificial Intelligence Doctors, CP30, drug companies, neighborhood pharmacy, R2D2, Robot Pharmacists.