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Munson Army Health Center Pharmacy installed a new robotic prescription-filling system July 15, and staff spent the weekend, July 16 and 17, learning how to use the new system so they would be ready for patients on Monday.
The ScriptPro Robotic Dispensing System can fill up to 150 prescriptions per hour
“The Script-Pro is a true robotic system versus the old system that we had,” Lead Pharmacy Technician James Mangan IV said. “We’ve completely replaced all the workstations, computers and machinery.”
Pharmacy staff trained Saturday on the basics of the new system and learned the new workflow and how to maintain the system, Mangan said, “so we’d be able to go live Monday with as few problems as humanly possible.”
On Sunday, staff got hands-on experience with the new system filling refill requests that had come in over the weekend.
Mangan said the new system will significantly decrease wait times and errors once employees are used to the new workflow. To the patient, the process is going to be the same — for new prescriptions patients will go up to the window and give the prescription to a technician who will enter it into the system.
“But now, if it (the medication) is in the new robots, as soon as we put the script into the computer it is going to automatically begin being filled,” Mangan said. “The old system had to wait for one of us to initiate it.”
Once a prescription is entered into the pharmacy computer system, a robotic arm determines the correct size vial and finds the specified drug. Using barcode scanning, the machine verifies the location of the drug and the robotic arm holds the vial and counts the pills as they are dropped into the vial. The vial is then placed on a conveyer belt and the label is applied.
Not all of the prescriptions the pharmacy fills are loaded into the machines, said Kimberly Hurtado, training supervisor for ScriptPro. The first day on the ground with the system was spent deciding which prescriptions could and should be loaded into the system.
“The robots are going to do capsules and tablets; it isn’t going to do something like docusate — that is sort of a gel cap or something with a hole in it — otherwise their fastest moving tablets and capsules should be in the robots,” Hurtado said.
Mangan said the system is going to improve the efficiency of the pharmacy and that the system is user-friendly, so new people will be easy to train.
“The hardest part is, as always, just people getting used to a new flow of things,” Mangan said.
Munson Army Health Center Pharmacy installed a new robotic prescription-filling system July 15, and staff spent the weekend, July 16 and 17, learning how to use the new system so they would be ready for patients on Monday.
The ScriptPro Robotic Dispensing System can fill up to 150 prescriptions per hour
“The Script-Pro is a true robotic system versus the old system that we had,” Lead Pharmacy Technician James Mangan IV said. “We’ve completely replaced all the workstations, computers and machinery.”
Pharmacy staff trained Saturday on the basics of the new system and learned the new workflow and how to maintain the system, Mangan said, “so we’d be able to go live Monday with as few problems as humanly possible.”
On Sunday, staff got hands-on experience with the new system filling refill requests that had come in over the weekend.
Mangan said the new system will significantly decrease wait times and errors once employees are used to the new workflow. To the patient, the process is going to be the same — for new prescriptions patients will go up to the window and give the prescription to a technician who will enter it into the system.
“But now, if it (the medication) is in the new robots, as soon as we put the script into the computer it is going to automatically begin being filled,” Mangan said. “The old system had to wait for one of us to initiate it.”
Once a prescription is entered into the pharmacy computer system, a robotic arm determines the correct size vial and finds the specified drug. Using barcode scanning, the machine verifies the location of the drug and the robotic arm holds the vial and counts the pills as they are dropped into the vial. The vial is then placed on a conveyer belt and the label is applied.
Not all of the prescriptions the pharmacy fills are loaded into the machines, said Kimberly Hurtado, training supervisor for ScriptPro. The first day on the ground with the system was spent deciding which prescriptions could and should be loaded into the system.
“The robots are going to do capsules and tablets; it isn’t going to do something like docusate — that is sort of a gel cap or something with a hole in it — otherwise their fastest moving tablets and capsules should be in the robots,” Hurtado said.
Mangan said the system is going to improve the efficiency of the pharmacy and that the system is user-friendly, so new people will be easy to train.
“The hardest part is, as always, just people getting used to a new flow of things,” Mangan said.
