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Robot Pharmacists

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the still-have-to-wait-an-hour dept.

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."

27 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. This is bad by dangermouse · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:This is bad by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.
      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    2. Re:This is bad by CrystalFalcon · · Score: 5, Funny

      The point of pharmacists should be obvious. You NEED to study for four years to understand the kind of handwriting they have to read to get you the right bottle.

  2. Quality of service? by psi_diddy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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."

  3. Re:And what happens when by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Funny

    The robot is less likely to make that mistake than humans.

  4. Why fill Bottles? by EABinGA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why fill Bottles? by mcgroarty · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      I've wondered about this as well. An English coworker told me that in the UK, every medication he'd seen was sold this way. Given that most all medication is prescribed in one month intervals at one of just a few dosages, it seems to make perfect sense.

      Being able to break apart the blister packs they're usually on also makes it much more convenient to pocket doses when going out and what not.

    2. Re:Why fill Bottles? by LostCluster · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because doctors can perscribe any whole number of pills to any given individual. (In fact, they can perscribe half pills at times too.) The law requires that the pharmacist give exactly the number of pills perscribed, no more and no less.

      Having them in pre-packaged units works for some medications, but for the vast majority you'd still find the phamacist having to rip the blister packs in half in order to get the exact number of doses the doctor requested.

    3. Re:Why fill Bottles? by EABinGA · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Being able to break apart the blister packs they're usually on also makes it much more convenient to pocket doses when going out and what not.

      Actually you would be in violation of federal law if you were to carry around medication like that, because it is not in its labelled container. Many people that carry their daily dose of pills around in pill organizers aren't even aware of that. Usually its no big deal, but it can get you busted big time.

    4. Re:Why fill Bottles? by rjamestaylor · · Score: 3, Informative
      • 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.
      Yes and no. First, note that my company, Dispensing Solutions, Inc., is a repackaging company specializing in point-of-care dispensing (meaning the physician or other prescribing healthcare provider hands the patient a bottle of the medication s/he prescribes instead of a prescription). I am not a pharmacist nor a healthcare professional; I'm the CTO and developer of the Internet-based point-of-care dispensing application (basically a real-time inventory control system with a procedurally controlled dispensing component), which is used in physician practices and community health clinics.

      The problem with the mfg making pre-packed bottles of drugs for instant dispensing is that doctors (more properly called "providers" since not only MD's can dispense drugs legally) don't prescribe the same number of pills and of the same strength for the same diagnosis. For example, Amoxicillin may come in 250 MG caplets or 500 MG caplets. A provider may prescribe 30 caps of Amoxicillin 250 MG,with one cap to be taken 4 times a day. Another may prescribe 28 caps. If the Rx says "28 caps" you can't dispense 30 caps just because that's the only bottle size you have on hand. Each provider has his/her own way, so mfg cannot pre-determine the dosing without practicing medication themselves.

      This then is where repackaging companies such as the one I work for come in. We work directly with the providers to determine the top 20% of prescriptions and work to standardize their prescribing habits, according to their direction. This way we can provide high-quality prepacked drugs for point-of-care dispensing.

      What's the benefit? One is quality control. With ever-increasing workloads and shrinking numbers of pharmacists the number of Rx fills per day is increasing, as is the number of errors and related injuries and deaths. In the same line, we are regulated by the FDA and licensed as a drug manufacturer. A pharmacist is regulated in each state by the Board of Pharmacy. The rules on cross-contamination are much more severe on us than on your local pharmacist. For example, penicillin is processed in the same area as all other drugs in a pharmacy, but we are forced to use a negative-air flow clean room for filling penicillin-type products and are not allowed to have any cross-contamination. It is unfortunately not uncommon for people allergic to penicillin to suffer anaphylactic shock from a cross-contaminated non-penicillin drug filled at a pharmacy.

      Another benefit is financial to the provider. Providers, by law, cannot receive money from prescriptions written to be filled by a pharmacist. But, as long as the service is provided to the provider's own patients in their own practice/clinic, they can make money dispensing drugs they would otherwise send out to be filled. Some providers make an extra one or two hundred thousand dollars a year just dispensing their most commonly prescribed drugs.

      There is a benefit to the insurer, or, more accurately, the pharmaceutical benefit manager (PBM). Each plan has a preferred formulary (say chosing Allegra over Clarinex for allergies). By having the preferred drug available in house the PBM could "give away" the preferred drug and save money over paying for the higher drug even with a higher co-pay.

      Another therapeutical benefit is in therapy compliance. Usually, a provider has no way of knowing if a prescription written has been filled. However, if the provider hands the patient the drug directly it has been shown that there is a higher probability of that patient completing the therapy prescribed.

      Lastly ('cause this is too long), there is a benefit for pharmacists, too. Precisely because the best use of a pharmacist's time is counselling not filling, we work with pharmacists to pre-pack common movers in their pharmacies. Thus the pharmacist needs only grab the right bottle matching the drug, strength, and count for the prescription. No counting (but they still collect the "fill fee"). This way the pharmacists can fill more prescriptions--safely.

      The filling machines are neat. We have several in our facility, including one that has the capacity to fill 200,000 bottles a day. While these machines are slick, they're expense is hard to swallow, especially when companies like DSI are able to fill the need. Neat article. Good to see it on Slashdot.

      --
      -- @rjamestaylor on Ello
  5. Slick Technology by edlong · · Score: 5, Informative

    This company, http://www.innovat.com (skip flash intro), innovation associates, has some cool technology that does this. For example, if the doctor mistakenly chooses pill A, instead of pill B, the machine will not dispense. Also, you can't fill the Tylenol Aspirin tray with anything but that. It uses some fancy recognition software; it can tell the difference between a skittle and and M&M, plus it won't dispense if pills are deformed (chiped etc.) cool stuff.

  6. Greaaat... by mcgroarty · · Score: 3, Funny
    The technology uses a bar-code system similar to those used to read prices in grocery stores.

    Great.

    *boop* Milk, 2% - $2.69...

    *boop* pretzel sticks - $1.39...

    *boop* ... ??? *boop* ... ??? *boop* *boop* *boop* ...??? "Just a moment, sir..."

    *skreeeeeeee* "PRICE CHECK ON 200MG TYLAMANEX ANTIDIURETIC INCONTINENCE AID(-id-id-id)!!!??? PRICE CHECK ON 200MG TYLAMANEX ANTIDIURETIC INCONTINENCE AID(-id-id-id-id)!!!???"

  7. Robotic System Errors by msobkow · · Score: 3, Informative

    I spent over two years working at NorTel's Bramalea site, which had robotic slide-lines for manufacturing surface-mount component boards. The equipment used tape hoppers of parts, which had individual components mounted on tape similar to a belt-fed machine gun. Once programmed, the robots themselves were flawless, doing exactly what they had been instructed.

    The errors that typically cropped up after an assembly program was put in production were caused by good old fashioned human error: loading the wrong parts tape in a hopper (e.g. resistors with the wrong ohm value.)

    I cannot see a robotic prescription-filler avoiding this problem. If someone fills the Atenolol (high blood pressure medication) hopper with Viagra, the robot is going to happily count out the correct number of the wrong pills, label them as Atenolol, and leave it up to humans to notice the error.

    Cashiers/assistants (sometimes part-time high school or university students) usually hand the packages to customers, not the pharmacist. Even if the bottles aren't pre-bagged, the assistants are very unlikely to notice the pills are the wrong color, size, or shape -- they don't know what the pills are supposed to look like.

    While I can see the benefit of a manually fed pill-counter device, all I can forsee from full automation are inevitable mis-filled prescriptions resulting in injury or death of the patients. This is one of the best examples of over-automation I've seen to date.

    Some jobs just shouldn't be fully automated, even if we have the technology to do so.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  8. Around for Years - Pharmacist STILL required by chicagothad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I work for a large (Fortune 500) prescription benefit management company. We use automation in all of our mail order facilities, pumping out 60000 prescriptions A DAY. We have had this technology in place for many years and is the only way mail order pharmacies are cheap and effective. The processing has several quality controls, but at the end of the line you still have a human pharmacist checking the drug. This is required by state laws...And yes, even with automation and 7 checks by machinery including an automated image comparison the pharmacist STILL catches errors.

    1. Re:Around for Years - Pharmacist STILL required by stoops · · Score: 3, Informative

      "And yes, even with automation and 7 checks by machinery including an automated image comparison the pharmacist STILL catches errors."

      that's pretty surprising. if you assume these checks are relatively unreliable - say they're 98% accurate.

      at 7 checks, you have an overall accuracy of 99.999999999872%. in other words, with these 7 checks, you're likely to miss an error once in 781,250,000,000 checks. if you assume that 1 in 10 prescriptions have en error in them, you'll fill about 7,8 trillion prescriptions before making an error. so if you're pumping out 60,000 prescriptions a day, you'll have an error once every 35,673 years.

      in other words, with 7 automated checks, you shouldn't really have any errors. what can we conclude? the automation sucks a lot.

  9. Re:Robots and mistakes by Jennifer+E.+Elaan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --

    Hardware, software, and blinking lights!

  10. Good and Bad by iiioxx · · Score: 4, Funny

    One the one hand, the robot will probably count faster than old Mr. Mulligan at my local drug store, so I'll get my prescription in 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes.

    On the other hand, the robot will probably count more accurately than old Mr. Mulligan, so I won't get the extra 5 or 10 pills that always seem to end up in my prescription bottle.

    Mr. Mulligan counting: "15... 20... 25... 30... 25... 30... 35... I think they're making these bottles smaller. I remember when one of these would hold 50 pills... Damn Koreans! I fought a war so we could have decent sized pill bottles..."

    I just hope they wait until he croaks before giving the robot his job. He's like 90 or something, it shouldn't be long.

  11. Re:OK, I'll finally ask... by phoebus1553 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Then you obviously don't know what a pharmacist really does. The 8 or so that I know don't count pills, that's what pharmacy techs do. The real pharmacist looks at the prescription and makes sure the doctor wasn't on crack when he wrote it.

    A doctor has to know how the body works and know all the warning signs for about half a million diseases, and the tests for the signs. Are they supposed to know all about 3/4 of a million drugs, their side effects, their dangerous interactions with the other drugs the patient is taking, and the proper dosage?

    I don't know how many times I've talked to the pharms' that I know that said some doctor prescribed something that was way too much/little for the patient's body or would've given them side effects that were worse than the origional problem.

    Hell, if the town my Grandma's hospital was in had a decent pharm. maybe she'd still be alive, rather than the drugs (to treat the side effects of the drugs (to treat the side effects of the drugs)) causing her kidneys to rot out of her body.

    --
    ----- - The beatings will continue until morale improves
  12. From the trenches� by (H)elix1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This seems like a great idea, until I read the line - "Doctors type prescriptions into a pharmacy computer system and the orders send the robot into action." This implies a physician (or health care provider if you prefer a more derogatory term the insurance world uses) will actually use technology.... Not just a computer, but a handheld, tablet PC, something with a browser... the chances are slim to none with most of the baby boomers out there.

    My first real world experience with CORBA was connecting a Cobol program on a mainframe to a Java application. The Java app would then shoot drug interaction and formulary data to be used by the Physician's winCE handheld. As a former biochemist that spent a serious amount of time working with MD/PhD's in a hospital, the app seemed like a killer idea - response time was fast, the data was secure, and the information was personalized. Then they tried to get them to use the thing. I understand 'you can lead a horse to water' on a whole new level.

    Anyhow, there is the human factor as well. It is hard to beat a well designed smart system, but I like the idea of requiring two humans - one to order the drug, another to confirm. The physician spends a surprisingly little amount of time in the real sciences compared to a pharmacist. Different skill set (filtered on what I consider real science). As a side note, pharmacists were pretty good with technology - since they were using Power Builder thick clients and later web interfaces to deal with co-pays, adjudication, interaction warnings, etc.

    Counting pills is not hard. Knowing that pill x with pill y scores you a role on the potion miscibility chart is priceless. A real easy fix to "has to read doctor's handwriting" problem? Get them to type the bloody prescription. Wait that would require them to use some funky software ranging from a typewriter to a computer thing...
    nah... too hard.

    Had this been a toolkit for a pharmacist, it would really take off.

    --
    +++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
  13. robots by east+coast · · Score: 4, Informative

    They missed the boat on this one. I work for a mail order pharmacedical company that has been using robotics to do the same thing for many years (atleast the 7 that i've been there).
    The most common misconception is that it replaces a pharamcist but by law (atleast here in the Pittsburgh PA area) the pharmacist still looks over the pills in the vial. But a pharmacists time is at a premium and machines are much more capable of doing the job of counting with less errors and faster than a human phar tech.
    Overall our "defect" rate is on par with your mom and pop store but our RXs per hour count is much higher.

    --
    Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
  14. Viagra trivia by Raetsel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    • "...refills grandpa's heart medication with viagra..."
    Funny you should choose that phrase...

    Sildenafil citrate (Viagra) was orininally researched as a heart medication. Pfizer only found out about the, uh, uplifting side effects when their male test patients were extremely reluctant to return test formulations of the drug.

    I think this one truly fits the definition of a "happy accident!"

    --

    "...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
  15. My friend owns one of these robots by jht · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I have a good friend who owns a large independent pharmacy in New England (I won't be more specific, because I'm not sure if he'd want it mentioned here - though his store and system have been profiled in both trade and general newspapers). He loves it - it handles his top 200 medications, and in his own paraphrased words:

    "It lets the pharmacists (of which he is one) spend more time with the patients, and less time counting pills."

    He is able to keep a couple fewer pharmacy techs on hand then he used to need for his volume, but it gives the pharmacists a nice assist. He worries less about mistakes - the sanity checks these machines have are a lot more reliable than a human's would be. He's told me he sleeps better at night, knowing the likelihood of a potentially fatal mistake is far lower because of the robot. He sees the role of a pharmacist as being to advise and dispense - with a strong emphasis on the first job.

    Here's a true anecdotal story supporting robot usage: I take a Priloec every day. One time I went to my local CVS to get a refill - when I got home and opened the bottle I found Prozac instead (the prescription label was correct - they just filled it with the wrong drug). They took care of the problem immediately, but imagine if I wasn't bright enough to realize that those pills weren't mine (I joke that I'd still have had stomach trouble, but I'd have been happy about it). Fortunately, taking a Prozac per day wouldn't have killed me, but what if it had been something that could have?

    That's where I can see robots helping the typical pharmacist. It'll prevent those sort of mistakes from happening, and ensure that the drug ordered is the drug given.

    --
    -- Josh Turiel
    "2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
  16. The point of this shouldn't be to. . . by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

    replace the pharmacist, for all the reasons you've stated and more. The point is to automate one of the routine jobs of the pharmacist where mechanical means is less prone to error and removes an act of pure labor from the job.

    The pharmacist should, as a matter of course, double check on the work of the robot, because even robots can make mistakes.

    This isn't like replacing the pharmacist. It's like giving a ditch digger a backhoe to replace his shovel, or automating a daily incremental system backup so the admin can spend his time and attention somewhere more profitable.

    KFG

  17. It's a Wonderful Machine by dexter+riley · · Score: 4, Funny

    SCENE: Gower's Pharmacy, Bedford Falls

    George Bailey: Mr. Gower?
    Mr. Gower: Zzzz...ehh, whuzza meh damn kid...
    George: Uh, you put the wrong pills in the vial...
    Mr. Gower: Uh? Ehh, aska drugbot, mumble mumble.
    George: M-mister Drugbot?
    DrugBot3000: SLEEP MODE
    George: You, you put the wrong pills in the bottle...
    DrugBot3000: INVALID COMMAND, PLEASE REPEAT YOUR REQUEST
    George: I said, you put the wrong pills in the bottle.
    DrugBot3000: INVALID COMMAND, PLEASE REPEAT YOUR REQUEST
    George: The pills! You put bad medicine in the bottle!
    DrugBot3000: INVALID COMMAND, PLEASE REPEAT YOUR REQUEST
    George: Why, you're nothing but a big fraud!
    DrugBot3000: ENTERING SLEEP MODE
    Gower: Zzzzz....
    George: ...aww, screw this, I'm going to Martini's.

  18. Handwriting? by nautical9 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this mean hand-writing-recognition has reached a huge milestone to actually understand what the doctor writes?

  19. You're misreading the article by srmalloy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
  20. A pharmacist's point of view by Dominum · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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