Well as another year is reaching the longest day the range of robots is increasing in pharmacies in both retail and hospital environments. ARX and their partners CareFusion and more recently Video System have lead the way in the UK. The SMART robot has created an affordable option for the smaller turnover pharmacy. The larger Vmax is still the favoured choice with hospital pharmacies. VideoSystems Pharmasafe will be of great use to many patients in the future and help to drive revenues for pharmacies who install them.
The robots offer efficient use of space and time. They help to keep operating costs down by helping to reduce stock holding. The Forth Valley Hospital reduced costs by £700,000 pounds in stock holding alone by installing a large robot. Their pharmacists use tablets to take drug histories on the wards and to order medicines from the pharmacy. Wards staff can monitor the progress of their patient’s prescriptions in the pharmacy via their PC, thus saving both staff time on the phone and disrupting the pharmacy operations and freeing up staff time for clinical reviews and customer service.
Robots are easy to keep clean, give a very professional appearance to the pharmacy and help to push up prescription numbers, many pharmacies show up to 20 % increase in prescription numbers.
They help to reduce errors and if a hopper is attached the orders can be loaded overnight saving staff time and increasing the efficiency of the dispensing during the day.
Hospitals are using 24/7 dispensing units to provide out of hours medicine supplies, and retail pharmacies have installed the new Pharmasafe units to facilitate safe out of hours supplies.