Pharmacy robot saves time counting pills

 

By Nicole Montesano

Smoke Signals staff writer

Tablet after tablet is counted into tiny vials inside the Grand Ronde Pharmacy, to be handed out to patients throughout the day, a careful, precise task that dominates the pharmacy’s working hours.

The pharmacy is a deceptively busy place. Obscured from view of the patients in the clinic by a series of hallways, it’s a long, narrow space where cabinets of medicines and medical devices line the walls, and employees work at computers set along a lengthy counter. The pharmacy, which serves Grand Ronde Tribal members and employees, hands out hundreds of prescriptions a day, vial after vial of tablets, each of which must be carefully filled with the correct medication in the correct dosage and the correct amount, to the correct patient.

Until a few years ago, two contract workers came in every day to help with all that counting. Now, occupying the center of the room is “ED,” named for a character in the original Terminator movie. But this ED is a robot as big as a large cabinet and considerably heavier, whose purpose is to fill prescriptions.

ED can hold 154 different medications and spends its days filling the pharmacy’s most-dispensed tablets, freeing up pharmacy staff to other tasks – including filling prescriptions for items that ED cannot handle, such as liquid medications and patches, along with medications that are less heavily in demand.

Pharmacy Director Lincoln Wright, PharmD RPh, said for the month of March, ED averaged filling 175 prescriptions a day – about 39% of the total prescriptions the pharmacy fills in a day. There are currently 2,298 unique items in the pharmacy, Wright said, but some are much more commonly dispensed than others.

“Some of these we’ll hand out 20 times a day,” Wright said. ED is restocked twice a day to keep those high-demand items moving briskly.

On one side, ED is covered with rows of tablet dispensers. Inside the machine, the robot counts pills for each prescription into bottles, labels the bottles and photographs the pills inside each one, just in case the prescription needs to be checked later if there are any discrepancies. It then caps the bottles and places them into alphabetized slots on the other side.

ED has been on the job since February 2020, when the pharmacy received an overall software upgrade that enabled the department to use it. ED has filled 114,461 scripts since coming online, Wright said.

Robots like ED are becoming more common in the industry.

“If you peer into your local Fred Meyer pharmacy and don’t see an ED, you can guess they’re probably filling 300 prescriptions or fewer a day,” he said.

Grand Ronde averages 450 to 500 per day, with that number sometimes shooting up to 700 or 800 a day after major holidays.

Since not everyone can get to the pharmacy during business hours, it also offers a second innovation: lockers that enable patients to pick up their items 24 hours a day.

“We had casino employees who were getting off at odd hours, so we would open up and find people sleeping in the lobby, waiting for us to open, so they could get their prescriptions and go home and go to bed,” Wright said. “We were trying to figure out how to serve them while maintaining our hours.”

The department soon found that many of their other customers also appreciated the lockers, as it meant not having to rush to the pharmacy before it closed after they got off work, or ask a relative to stop in for them. Patients can request locker pickup online, by phone or via the pharmacy app.

“That’s been by far the most popular thing we’ve done since I started,” Wright said.

Installed in December of 2020, the 103 lockers have seen more than 58,315 deliveries with 3,127 patients signed up to use them.

A remodel is in the works for the pharmacy that will extend the building, adding more work space and changing the design that now requires workers in the back to use walkie talkies to communicate with staff at the front desk. Wright said the plans call for adding additional lockers as well.