Tech firms answer chain pharmacy's call for productivity

Drug Store News,  Dec 15, 2003  by Dan Scheraga

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Operating an application in a hosted environment rather than on in-store servers dramatically reduces the complexity of system maintenance. In a hosted environment, patches, updates and reconfigurations need only be applied once, at a single central point. When solutions run on in-store servers, every change must be applied multiple times: once at each affected store.

"When you have to apply patches and upgrades at the store level, that can be very time- and labor-consuming, and it opens the door for inconsistencies to crop up from store to store," Thompson said. "That's why centralized hosting is hot today. Our customers are beginning to see the wisdom of it, and they're asking for it."

Thompson added that in a hosted or ASP environment, solutions can be configured to serve all pharmacies identically, or the locations can be broken down into blocks to be configured separately. The flexibility is tremendous," he said.

Automated dispensing

Solutions providers also have made advances in drug-dispensing technologies, too. Demand for automated pharmacy solutions seems to be riding high. "We're seeing a lot of interest in our drug-dispensing robots from retail chain pharmacies in the U.S. and Canada," said Mary Reno of Innovation Associates. She added that the U.S. Air Force recently agreed to deploy Innovation Associates' Robotic Dispensing System II worldwide, starting with a rollout in Colorado Springs, Colo.

At the NACDS pharmacy show, Vernon Hills, Ill.-based AutoMed offered up its new R800 device. The robot is designed for pharmacies that fill between 200 and 800 prescriptions in a typical day. With the ability to count, fill and label up to 170 vials per hour, the robot is the fastest of its kind, according to vice president of marketing Russ Marable.

The device is built for speed in more ways than one, Marable said. It is designed to be rolled into a pharmacy setting and begin operating within an hour or two. Because the robot is designed to take the place of a standard piece of shelving, no remodeling of the pharmacy space is necessary. The R800, is integrated with AutoMed's flagship Efficiency Workpath System pharmacy management solution.

The R800 is priced for small- to-mid-sized retail pharmacies. "We wanted to create something that was cost-effective and within reach of smaller players," Marable said. "Not every store needs an $800,000 robot."

Much of the R800's benefit comes from improved prescription-fill accuracy, especially when it is combined with the Efficiency Workpath System, Marable added. The Efficiency Workpath System uses bar-coding and imaging every step of the way. It dramatically improves accuracy."

Marable cited recent research that finds that the average pharmacy makes four errors out of every 250 prescriptions. "Obviously, there's a heavy liability figure associated with that," he said.

Other advances in automated drug-dispensing technology were debuted at the NACDS pharmacy show, as well. ScriptPro unveiled its Collating Control Center. Designed to be used with ScriptPro's SP-100 or SP-200 drug-dispensing robots, the Collating Control Center sorts and organizes the robot's output based on the pharmacy's needs. Most commonly, the device sorts multiple prescriptions by patient name, presenting all of the patient's prescriptions in a. single package. The Collating Control Center can also be configured to bundle multiple prescriptions together for deliveries.