Robot Pharmacists

Makarand writes "The next time you visit a pharmacy your prescription may be filled by a robot according to a TechTV article. Hospitals and drugstores are now increasingly relying on automated technology to count, bottle, and label prescription drugs in a faster and more accurate way. The technology uses a bar-code system similar to those used to read prices in grocery stores. Doctors enter prescription details directly into the pharmacy computer. The robot springs into action when an order is recieved. Riding on a conveyor belt, the robot picks up an empty vial, identifies the bar code of the chosen drug, and automatically fills the drug bottle."

Comments

This is bad

[dangermouse]

Human pharmacists have always served as information resources for their customers, and even as a check on poorly-chosen prescriptions from doctors.

I can understand automating away the cashier or the janitor, but automating away a job where human judgment is so crucial is a terrible idea.

Re:This is bad

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I've never understand the point of pharmacists. Really. To reply to dangermouse, shouldn't the doctor be an information resource? Also, the doctor should be picking the right prescriptions in the first place. I don't want to upset the pharmacists here, but it's just something I've never understood. I say, bring on the robots!!

To put it very simply: it's the doctor's job to decide what medications you should take, it's the pharmacist's job to tell you how to take it, and just as importantly, how not to take it.

This is an oversimplification, of course. A good physician needs to be able to give a patient advice on using medications. But doctors are busy; very, very often the doc needs to shoo the patient out of the exam room to get to the next patient, and the (often very confused) patient goes down to the pharmacy to get everything straightened out. This is particularly important for older people who may be a bit confused anyway, and on a whole shitload of different medications.

The problem of patients on multiple meds brings up another valuable function of pharmacists, which is catching drug interactions. Ideally, every time you went to the doctor -- any doctor, in any specialty, at any hospital or clinic, for every problem -- that doctor would a) know everything about your medical history (pharmaceutical and otherwise) and b) know every possible drug interaction and contraindication. The real world, of course, doesn't live up to this ideal. The fact is that people are more consistent in their pharmacist than in their doctor; old people with multiple conditions very often go to see several different specialists, but get all their meds from the same place. When a patient has a list of meds that fills both sides of a sheet of paper (and believe me, I've seen it) it's nice to have that extra sanity check.

Finally, good clinics and hospitals are increasingly finding it useful to have at least one or two PharmD's on staff to advise the physicians before the prescription is issued. "Hey, I've got this guy who's on Alizadol and Corvabarin, but his liver enzymes are running kind of high; what do you think of giving him Zelarin instead of the Alizadol?" (Drug names are made up, of course -- hey, it's New Year's, and my own biochemistry is a little altered right now; you want me to think of real ones right off the bat? ;) MD's know a great deal about the human body, but they very often find it impossible to keep up with the dizzying variety of chemicals designed to be put into the body.

When it's your body they're screwing with, it's good to have several sources of human judgement. Doctors can and do make mistakes, either because of a lack of specialized knowledge or (very often, especially in the case of interns) because of exahustion. Pharmacists very often keep those mistakes from killing people.

Quality of service?

[psi_diddy]

Of course robots may break down, too, especially since they're only as good as the humans who program them. As an added safety feature, a camera takes a digital picture of pills in each bottle so a pharmacy screener can compare the pills in the picture to the doctor's orders and make sure the robot made no mistakes.

Having seen one of these in action, the device is only as good as the guy filling the drug bins, who thanks to this marvelous technology will be a college intern who stayed up late last night studying for his exams. He will also be the guy checking the picture at the end. "Yup, those are pills."

Why fill Bottles?

[EABinGA]

I don't understand why in the US pharmacists need to fill bottles. It seems such a waste of time, and would seem to increase the cost of medication dramatically.

It would be much easier to have them prepackaged at the manufacturer, so the pharmacist simply reaches in the shelf and grabs the prepackaged box of whatever the doctor prescribed.

Re:Robots and mistakes

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

Barcode reading errors are extremely rare with a proper lase reader. The only way the robot would mismatch barcodes is if the bottles were labelled incorrectly, and that would be a human error. They still put cameras to catch such glitches though, so the pharmacist should still notice.

As for the question of resources, if these machines cost a half million dollars each, I'm willing to bet that they are nearly as good as what the drug manufacturers use.

I would expect, although I'm not sure, that a half-million dollar piece of medical equipment would be jam packed with batteries in case of a power failure. In the unlikely occurance of a jam, or a natural disaster taking down most of the electronics (this sounds rather like a straw-man argument to me), there has been a relatively good track record with extra staff. The recent network packet storm in a major hospital comes to mind, everyone was busy but service was not particularly degraded, even with the network completely out of commission.

Besides this, for a regular pharmacy, delays of a day or two to get a prescription filled are not unusual in some cases. Only in emergency cases is this a mission-critical system, and emergency drugs are usually available in places other than the main dispensory.

You're misreading the article

[srmalloy]

Human pharmacists have always served as information resources for their customers, and even as a check on poorly-chosen prescriptions from doctors.

I can understand automating away the cashier or the janitor, but automating away a job where human judgment is so crucial is a terrible idea.

The problem is that pharmacies and patients don't use the same terms. When your doctor writes you a prescription, you take it to a pharmacy to get it filled. When the pharmacist takes your prescription script, they fill it and then dispense it to you.

When a pharmacy fills a prescription, what they are doing is to take the ordered quantity of the medication out of their stock and package it; when they dispense a prescription, they present it to the patient along with information about how and when to take it. Filling machines as described in the article don't take the place of a pharmacist -- they're taking the place of the pharmacy techs back inside the pharmacy who type up prescription labels, count out pills, and put them in prescription bottles. This means that the people working in the pharmacy don't have to take as much time preparing the prescription, and can spend more time with the patient.

Fill robots don't replace the pharmacist; what they do is eliminate the place where many medication mistakes occur -- selecting and measuring out the drug that the patient will receive. Drug manufacturers deliberately make pills and capsules with different shapes, colors, sizes and markings in order to help both the patients and the pharmacy staff tell them apart, but a pharmacy tech can still make a mistake and pick the wrong canister off the shelf when pulling a medication, and not notice that they've got the wrong little white pill, particularly when they've got lots of prescriptions to fill. A fill robot doesn't make that mistake; as long as the correct drug is in the correct hopper (and it's easier to make sure you've got the right drug when you're only touching the supply to put another 10,000 pills in the hopper, rather than for each of the 60-pill prescriptions that would be filled from that supply), the fill robot will always pick the correct drug.

And the situation is not as generally clear-cut as the article portrays. Where I work -- a major military hospital -- I am the manager for the pharmacy module of the medical information system at the hospital. The pharmacy has a large fill robot that processes refills; patients can either bring in a prescription for refill or use the phone- or web-based refill system to order their refills. Prescriptions entered for refill are processed by the main medical information system (checking to make sure that there are still refills available on that Rx, that the patient isn't trying to refill the Rx too soon, etc.), and then are sent to the fill robot, which fills and labels the refills, which are then distributed to the satellite pharmacies that the patients have selected to pick up their refills. The prescriptions don't need counselling or instructions, because the patient got those when they got the prescription initially.

A pharmacist's point of view

[Dominum]

I work in a retail setting and have actually seen and used one of these robots. This particular model was by Baker, and is a $125,000 piece of equipment. Most facilities implement one of these robots because of extremely high volumes, to assist in the mundane filling tasks associated with pharmacy. I am not aware of any Federal or State Regulation which allows robots to fill your prescription without a pharmacist on duty, so do not assume that automation of pharmacy means lack of supervision. The Baker unit I described above is sent information from a pharmacy computer, not from a doctor. At this point, I consider direct doctor-to-robot input sketchy at best, unless a prototype model. (Imagine your crusty old country physician firing up his Compaq iPaq and transmitting a prescription on his wireless network to the local robot pharmacy...yeah get the picture?) I know of towns in the rural southwest where the pharmacist literally rides into town once a week to fills rxs that day and that day only... But anyway, this particular robot holds about 180 drugs, holds the vials and caps, and actually fills, prints and labels your prescription. This model can fill about 100 rxs per hour and if it breaks, the ancillary staff has to pick up the slack. I like the analogy previously posted that describes the robot as giving a ditch digger a backhoe instead of a shovel. However, I am very concerned about how technology has affected pharmacy over the last 100 years. WE actually used to compound medication, not a pharmaceutical company in the MAJORITY of cases. Does this mean I want to go back to hand-rolling suppositories? (we used to do that too) No. All I ask is that the benevolent readers of /. be concerned that there is a licensed pharmacist on duty no matter WHO or WHAT fills your prescription. If not, then start to panic :-) Dom