Pharmacy Automation Robot

[Niobe Hennigan]

Inpatientand outpatient pharmacies can leverage adherence packaging and inspection, vial filling automation, and inventory management technologies to improve everyday workflow and the health of their patients.

Communities are still in love with their neighborhood pharmacies. Deliver the services to improve medication adherence, making it easy for patients, while saving time and money on inventory to increase volume.

Cut waste and costs while managing increased prescription volume by introducing automation solutions designed with the DoD pharmacy in mind. Deliver the best to those serving on the front lines and their families.

Incorporate brand identification for your business and personalization for your customers with convenient, safe packaging. Change the lives of your on-the-go customers and boost your brand recognition with scalable packaging solutions.

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When it comes to pharmacy automation, pharmaceutical manufacturing,and life sciences, what manufacturers need most is productionsystems that can safely process, dispense, label, and packagemedications and prescriptions at high volume. Pharmacy automationproviders must be able to prove their equipment and solutionsoperate with precision at all times to ensure medications are beingmanufactured to the right dose and prescriptions are filled with thecorrect quantity.

FANUC America and our AuthorizedSystem Integrators (ASIs) have decades of experience inhelping pharmaceutical manufacturers meet their production andproductivity goals with customized pharmacy automation systems androbotic pharmacy solutions. Bottom line: Nobody has more experiencein pharmacy automation and life science solutions than FANUC and ourexperienced team of ASIs.

FANUC cleanroom robots are specifically designed to work inpharmaceutical or lab environments. Our clean room robots werebuilt to meet the standard requirements (IP67 standard) ofhighly demanding pharmacy and lab environments - with nocompromise of robot speed and repeatability. Based on a slim,entirely encapsulated design, our clean room robots reach highflexibility levels, adding versatility to their ability toperform many types of automated pharmacy applications withincompact cells, such as automated medication dispensing. FANUC cleanroom robots can achieve Clean room Class ISO 5, andhave a much higher reliability than manual applications. Formore information about our clean room robots contact our salesteam today.

Pharma and clean room robots have proven to help improve workingconditions in hospital and pharmacy settings. With decades ofindustryexperience and expertise, our team of robotics experts haveautomatednearly every pharma application possible. Pharmacy automationapplication areas include:

To help pharmaceutical manufacturers keep up with speed anduncompromising quality control required in this industry, FANUCdeveloped a line of specialty robots that excel in high speedpick and place applications. If you're in the need for a roboticpharmacy solution that requires the utmost speed, precision andaccuracy, be sure to check out our SCARARobots, and our DeltaRobots.

FANUC America specializes in completely automated pharmacysystems -Frompackaging line design to pharma-ready equipment manufacturingandintegration, you can rely on FANUC. Pharmaceutical companiesaroundtheworld count on our robots and pharma automation solutions tomanufacturethe highest quality products with speed, precision and accuracy.Whetheryou're using FANUC cleanroom robots in a pharmaceutical setting forautomateddispensing, or a standard robot for cartoning, labeling,packagingandpalletizing lifesaving medicine, FANUC has pharma automationsolutionsthat will improve you processes without sacrificing accuracy orquality,while leaving you in complete control of the manufacturingprocess.

The robots tower over humans, both in size and ability to deliver medications accurately. Housed in a tightly secured, sterile environment, the automated system prepares oral and injectable medicines, including toxic chemotherapy drugs. In addition to providing a safer environment for pharmacy employees, the automation also frees UCSF pharmacists and nurses to focus more of their expertise on direct patient care.

The new pharmacy currently serves UCSF hospitals at Parnassus and Mount Zion and has the capacity to dispense medications for the new UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay, scheduled to open in 2014. As the phase-in continues, additional steps in the process will be eliminated as doctors begin inputting prescriptions directly into computers in 2012.

Studies have shown that technology, including barcoding and computerized physician entry, as well as changes in hospital processes for medication management, can help reduce errors. The pharmacy also will enable UCSF to study new ways of medication delivery with the goal of sharing that knowledge with other hospitals across the country.

The automated system also compounds sterile preparations of chemotherapy and non-chemotherapy doses and fills IV syringes or bags with the medications. An automated inventory management system keeps track of all the products, and one refrigerated and two non-refrigerated automated pharmacy warehouses provide storage and retrieval of medications and supplies.

By using robots instead of people for previous manual tasks, pharmacists and nurses will have more time to work with physicians to determine the best drug therapy for a patient, and to monitor patients for clinical response and adverse drug reactions.

Manuel Reyes, a technician with Swisslog, monitors the company's Pill Picker, part of a system of robots located at the Robotic Pharmacy at UCSF Mission Bay that precisely distributes medication to patients at UCSF Medical Center. Photo: Susan Merrell/UCSF

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.

UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital are world leaders in health care, known for innovative medicine, advanced technology and compassionate care. Our expertise covers virtually all specialties, including cancer, heart disease, infertility, neurological disorders, organ transplantation and orthopedics as well as special services for women and children. UCSF Medical Center has been ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the nation's top 10 premier hospitals for 10 consecutive years.

Nearly three decades later, Omnicell has expanded beyond the hospital and into retail pharmacy settings too. The company aims to support more efficient management of medication across all care settings through automation, with more than 50,000 institutional and retail pharmacies across the US and UK leveraging its robotic drug dispensing solutions.

The specialty pharmacy industry can reduce costs by $27.5 million annually (product and call centre staff costs only) if visual temperature indicators were used as decision-making tools to determine if medicine should be used or returned when patients suspect heat damage.

Designed to automate tasks such as dispensing pills, searching for medication and managing stock levels, these digital drug dispensing solutions have the potential to radically change the face of the modern pharmacy.

The main problem with chaotic storage is that the picking speed can be quite slow because the robot will often need to move packs around to find the one it needs. The time between making a dispensing request to receiving the pack in a chaotic storage system is around 14 seconds.

The alternative method of channel-fed dispensing involves storing drugs in individual metal or plastic channels, each of which is dedicated to just one drug type. Channel-fed dispensing allows for much faster picking speeds compared to chaotic storage, taking around four seconds to dispense a single pack.

In care homes patients are typically on multiple medications, meaning multiple packs that have to be found, scanned, and de-blistered to the correct quantities, leaving loads of room for error in the original pack dispensing room.

Research published last year in the British Medical Journal estimated that 237 million medication errors occur at some stage in the dispensing process in England each year, with nearly 39% occurring in primary care. While 72% of these errors were thought to have little-to-no potential for harm, 66 million were thought to be potentially clinically significant.

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and improving thanks to new technologies, especially for pharmacies. Pharmacies require many different systems to stay precise, accurate, and timely so it is important to always stay up to date with the latest technology when it comes to this profession.

Pharmacy automation has been at the forefront of the technology transformation to benefit healthcare professionals and patients alike. The ability to automate everything from repetitive tasks to the seamless sharing of health records has improved the way pharmacists work effectively and manage patient prescriptions.

Pharmacy automation is the mechanically engineered process of handling and dispensing medications. There are many different types of automation machines that range from websites and programs to organize your pharmacy to dispensing robots that can count and dispense medications. Other examples of automation include patient medication record systems, digital displays, prescription recording applications, pharmacy management systems, prescription collection points, and so much more.1 The market for pharmacy automation is quickly expanding and becoming more common due to the large benefits of these machines and the limited amount of time at work pharmacies have.

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