Prescription volumes are growing and pharmacists are in alarmingly short supply. This means more stress on pharmacy staff, and more potential for errors and customer dissatisfaction.
The distributive components of pharmacy lend themselves very well to automation and some organizations have already taken advantage of robotic technology to speed up prescription processing. Not only is speed an issue, but the use of robotics can minimize distributive error. As Demming, and others, have pointed out, many errors in a process are due to a high variability in the process. Reduce variability and errors are reduced.
Pharmacy robots have been used in both in-patient and out-patient settings. However they are not a univeral panacea for pharmacy distribution, and poor implementation of a robotic system can lead to poor results and in some cases induce more stress than they were designed to relieve.
Links to other robotics websites: Tricare