9 ms·

Walgreens Turns to Prescription-Filling Robots to Free Up Pharmacists

44 points by lxm 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago
Pharmacists usually don't fill prescriptions in the sense of counting out the pills into the bottles. Pharmacy technicians do that. Pharmacists have a lot more training and have to be able to discuss drug interactions and side effects with patients, etc. Article is paywalled but it is technicians, not pharmacists, that they are trying to "free up".
jmount 4y ago
In a non-compounding pharmacy (which is what most pharmacies are now days) I presume they are not making pills or capsules. So one could eliminate almost all of the chain if pills just came pre-packaged in containers closer to what is given to the consumer. I.e.: put this stuff in small jars at the factory with a machine.
- klondike_ 4y ago
  I never understood why drug manufacturers bother creating retail packaging for their drugs which the patient never sees. It just ends up in that generic orange bottle anyways. Why not cut out the middleman? Package them in common amounts at the factory, and then slap the doctor's instructions on the bottle.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    One (common) prescription I get I just get a pre-packaged prescription bottle with a label slapped on. Not sure why my other equally common prescriptions aren't provided in the same form.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Presumably it’s much more cost effective to ship pills in containers that are much larger than increments of 30, 60, 90 etc. But paying a pharm tech to count it isn’t really free. I wish I knew too, because one of my scripts is like that as well and it’s only a 30 unit script.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        And yet, we don't ship (most) food in bulk to supermarkets for local repackaging for consumer sale. Certainly it's cheaper for the manufacturer to ship in larger lots and have the retailer take care of the consumer sale, but it's usually more efficient overall to do at least most of the packaging at the factory.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - ourmandave 4y ago
    So I had to look up drug packaging and the second sentence on wikipedia says: Pharmaceutical packaging is highly regulated but with some variation in the details, depending on the country of origin or the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_packaging
  - throwaway098328 4y ago
    We already do this for Zithromax Z-Pak, Imitrex, Diflucan, and Medrol DosePak where the directions and prescribed quantity are always the same. For other drugs, in practice you get short supply on a drug, and can only fill a partial, or you have patients that only want a weeks worth. Another factor is the packaging adds extra cost, and it's cheaper to order a bulk 500 count bottle.
- wikibob 4y ago
  In the rest of the world pharmaceutical drugs come in end-user retail packaging. Primarily blister-packs. It’s mostly only the USA that has bulk packaging that is then counted out into bottles at the time of dispensing.
  - throwaway098328 4y ago
    This is true, retail pharmacies order bulk packages, however in hospitals we order blister packs since unit dose is preferred.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
chevman 4y ago
Interesting it took them this long to purse the opportunity here. Something like 10-20 drugs make up like 80% of the maintenance meds dispensed in the US daily. Supply chain efficiencies like this were monetized 20+ years ago by most of the major PBMs/health plans (look at their 'mail order dispensing pharmacies' to see them in action). Doing a regionalized fulfillment play for your high volume geographies will likely save hundreds of millions in opex i'm guessing. Will be curious to see if WBA can scale as quickly as they want here. I'm sure there are many industry partners who could lend a hand :)
- analog31 4y ago
  Indeed, my health plan uses Express Scripts. It's been utterly foolproof.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Probably not a popular opinion, but I think we can do away with the vast majority of pharmacist. There are machines that can properly identify, sort, bottle, label, and provide prescriptions with little to no human intervention. All it seems the pharmacist does is pop bottles, fill prescriptions, file insurance claims over and over and over again.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  At least in the UK the pharmacist’s job is to check the prescription makes sense and isn’t going to poison the patient, and also to give crucial directions to the patient as they probably won’t read the leaflet. Seems like an important job.
  - maxsilver 4y ago
    Except in a few very rare cases, we don't really have that in the US. In the US, the job of the pharmacist is mostly to deny patients their prescription medicine on an insurance companies behalf, or to deny a handful of the most vulnerable patients their prescription medicine because of personally-held extremist political beliefs. (/s, but like, only slightly)
    - shigawire 4y ago
      Very confidently incorrect. Doctors generally know very little about drugs and dosing - the pharmacist is the one protecting you from mixing inappropriate meds.
      - bigyikes 4y ago
        How can this be? Every prescription I’ve ever had was dosed by my doctor. How can you possibly prescribe a drug without knowing about drug dosing?
    - drugstorecowboy 4y ago
      This has been my experience exactly. I really like how the pharmacist who knows literally nothing about me, my diagnosis, life circumstances, family history etc... is supposed to be "the last line of defense" against all those silly doctors writing prescriptions that will kill their patients. It almost seems like the doctor might be the right person to decide what medications would work for me. If I didn't know better I might think that pharmacists inflate their importance to try and maintain their comfortable position with a nice salary for a job that a fancy soda machine could do.
ourmandave 4y ago
Once Walgreens proves it works, won't take long for every other pharmacy to follow.
hn2022hn2022 4y ago
Pharmacists are the last barrier for the patient to make sure the scripts written by the doctor/s don't kill the patient. Pharmacy techs are the ones that fill the scripts, but the pharmacist is ultimately responsible that it's correct. Pill filling robots are great if you're filling the same 10 scripts, but not very useful when dealing with complex and compounding scripts. My father was a pharmacist and we owned an independent pharmacy and I remember how often the scripts written by the doctor was so wrong and had it not been caught it would have killed the patient. Knowledge of drug interactions are key, but these days new pharmacists just look up online, so a pill filling robot could work.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  How can a person possibly be better at knowing the graph of drug interactions better than a program can? Like, isn't the human just going to have human error (like the doctor)?
  - mrtesthah 4y ago
    Two humans looking at something are better than one.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      But a program could still have a much lower error rate.
      - nominusllc 4y ago
        Humans tell the program how to act, it's chicken and egg.
        onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        No, it's not. Humans tell a calculator how to calculate. It's never wrong. Humans (without a calculator) get math wrong constantly.
ck2 4y ago
Doesn't "free up" actually, eventually mean "fire"? Reduce employment costs? Like kiosks at fast-food places? Personally I'm sticking to mail-order rx for the rest of my life, pretty sure I caught covid at the pharmacy from the pharmacist who was refusing to mask. Imagine how filthy that checkout pad is at the pharmacy with every sick person touching it. Plus the prices are much more competitive.
- FractalParadigm 4y ago
  I don't see it as jobs lost, but jobs moved. You still need people to build these robots (or self-service kiosks), and you need people to maintain both hardware and software. One less pharmacist at the front-line is one more developer working on the software, or maybe that pays for two technicians instead. It's no different at the fast food level ether, it's just Industry 4.0 thinking in retail.
  - petra 4y ago
    In general, costs are a decent estimate of the amount of work needed to do something. And we know that automation greatly reduces costs.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Yes, but we really should take a more optimistic view of automation. We now have an autonomous system that can do work a human previously had to waste their time and effort doing. The automation isn't the problem, it's capitalism. The gains from automation are realized by the owner which isn't the worker.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I’ve automated away plenty of jobs. Even had my own job automated once. People don’t get fired. Worst case is the company stops hiring, and lets “natural attrition” take over. Companies spend a lot of money hiring people, and good workers are hard to find. If you’re happy with an employee, and they would prefer to stay instead of find a new job, then you have a good match. Don’t mess with that.
DoktorDelta 4y ago
Presumably this will prevent pharmacists from denying people their prescriptions on religious grounds, which would be a welcome change.
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  Who can't get pills?
  - sfvegandude 4y ago
    https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3565754-boycottwalgreens-trends-after-people-say-they-were-denied-birth-control-pills-condoms/ https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3565754-boycottwalgree...
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    https://jezebel.com/non-pregnant-women-and-girls-are-being-denied-lifesavin-1849606994 https://jezebel.com/non-pregnant-women-and-girls-are-being-d...
- hgsgm 4y ago
  No because the process has to be supervised by a pharmacist.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Indeed, I fail to see why a pharmacist still couldn't refuse to turn on the pill filling machine anyway on religious grounds.
- throwaway098328 4y ago
  Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The prescription has to be reviewed by a pharmacist before it will even dispense through an automatic dispensing system.
duffpkg 4y ago
Healthcare executive 20 years, wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly... So long as this is used for routine filling of routine medications with low risks I think this can work. However it is also my opinion that Walgreens is a very, very poorly run organization. If you followed the Theranos story and documents you can see just how poorly. To the people saying pharmacists should not be involved at all, that is insane. Prescription errors are a very large source of preventable error that causes significant harm. Lots of error cannot be solved by computer because it lacks the information, like identity, drug and dosing errors. There are a lot of inputs that only a human can evaluate at dispensing time. This robotic filling, as I read it, does not necessarily prevent that. For reference, there are roughly ~110 million possible drug formulations (drug x dose x route etc) that are currently legally dispensable and distinct, in the US. Any drug can interact with any other, different dose x route x drug combinations may interact differently. A large set of the population is on dozens of drugs simultaneously. Taking into account the patients age/weight/race/level of sickness is important and makes the overall matrix very very large for raw computation. You might then say: well humans aren't good at a matrix that large either, that is in some ways true but humans are pretty good at detecting exceptional circumstances even though though they are not rotely walking that large key space. It is also true that there is a heavy weighting towards about 1,000 much more common drugs. It is not a new idea to add computers to interactions/dispensing/etc. It has been tried for 20 years, the outcome results of many efforts have been poor. A gold standard in pharmacy interactions is to maximize the amount of time between pharmacist and patient. Pharmacists aren't pill monkeys rotely stuffing things in bottles. They have important diagnostic, education and safety functions. Especially when they can see and interact with the patient. If there was any true broad economic incentive to be preventative pharmacists would take your vitals and temperature as well but currently our system does not make that economic.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I disagree that it’s as complicated as you’re making it seem. There are only a few cases, relatively, where the “age/weight/race/level of sickness” is taken into account, and the prescribing physician would be the one that makes that call rather than a pharmacist. There’s also nothing that says that information couldn’t be transferred along with a prescription. It’s not like a centralized system wouldn’t have all that information about you, along with any other prescriptions and even non-prescription medications previously purchased with Walgreen’s (or any other pharmacy, they all do it) rewards card. A computer can also certainly be trained to identify outliers, and can certainly process complex interactions (not that there’s nearly as many or as varied and diverse as you’re making it seem) better than a human can, with the same data. At the end of the day there’s a finite number of these interactions, and while things like dosage might affect some, overall it’s groups of drugs that interact with each other which is generally looked at. Finally, at least for me, every time I get a prescription filled I get literally a 5 second conversation with a pharmacist at best. 10 seconds if it’s a new prescription with a particularly bad side effect. Suffice to say, I don’t think you’ve shown why exactly a human would be better than a machine at this job.
CompleteWalker 4y ago
This is interesting to me, as I try to change careers with no degree. I recently applied for the Walgreens Pharmacy Tech Apprenticeship.[^1] But, it seems like those jobs will be automated away soon too... I'm really looking for a tech support job, but options are limited in this small town. [^1]https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/pharmacy#grid-content-1-2 https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/pharmacy#grid-content-1-2
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  Pharmacy Techs should be relatively safe for awhile. In a busy pharmacy the techs do most of the work with a single pharmacist overseeing. Techs even operate the automated pill counters and such.
banana_giraffe 4y ago
My local pharmacy has a pill dispensing robot for the common prescriptions. This story seems to be more about centralizing the workload to some big locations than it is incidentally about the robots. It's going to be fun to be on the front line when this new chain borks up and some bignum% of your customers can't pick up their Rx for a few days.
greenyoda 4y ago
Archive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/AxyKF https://archive.ph/AxyKF
avnigo 4y ago
I honestly never quite understood why prescriptions in the US need to be literally filled, when in the EU, for example, you can just walk up with your prescription to any pharmacy and buy a prepackaged blister pack of the medicine you need. Not only do blister packs save so much waiting time — you never have to wait for it unless it's out of stock — but it also feels like there's less chance for anything to go wrong when manually handled by the pharmacist, factoring cross-contamination or incorrect filling, even though the pharmacists would either way be liable for it. Blister packs are verifiably sealed by the manufacturer, you're more likely to tell if they've been tampered with, you don't have to worry about moisture seeping into the excipient and interacting with the active ingredients, and they provide a visual representation of how many pills you have already taken, without needing to count pills in a bottle.
- refurb 4y ago
  It's mostly just how it's been done. You can still get a prescription "filled" by getting blister packs in the US. But if you think of drugs that are dispenses in the tens of thousands each month, like cholesterol medication - the amount of packaging the pharmacy would have to store would be massive.
  - sithadmin 4y ago
    It's more than tradition and efficiency; the US doesn't have the supply chain trust issues that many other countries do when it comes to prescription drugs. There are plenty of parts of the world where a bottle of loose pills is going to be treated as suspect no matter who dispenses it to the patient. Giving consumers individual packages with counterfeit-deterrent measures and serialization that can be verified with the manufacturer as part of a valid production lot increases consumer confidence and makes counterfeiting more difficult.
linuxftw 4y ago
What a needlessly complex, pointless machine. Reminds me of the brick-laying robot.
- nradov 4y ago
  Then maybe you should build a simpler robot. There is a huge market in other pharmacies and you could make a fortune. Or maybe you have no clue about robotics, and don't understand the actual complexities involved.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    TCO will be far higher than traditional fills. This won't eliminate any positions, you'll still need people to handle the orders, load the hoppers, etc. You'll have people just standing around (best case) or fighting with the machine half the time (more likely). In all but the highest volume setting, this is a waste of money. That doesn't describe your neighborhood Walgreens. I'm confident that if you follow the money on this project, a board member of Walgreens owns part of the robotics company or is affiliated with a VC firm that's backing it. There's no way this isn't straight corporate legalized theft. Feel free to follow up with me in 5 years when everyone's totally forgot about this farce.
jordemort 4y ago
I've been a Walgreens customer since birth, but after multiple incidents of vaccination appointments getting blown off and lost prescriptions and test results I moved all my prescriptions somewhere else earlier this year. They can't keep their pharmacies staffed. Getting prescriptions filled by a robot sounds like it would feel unsafe, but getting prescriptions filled by an overworked skeleton crew felt pretty unsafe too. I hope the robot isn't from the same team that built those awful always-busted screens they have on their drink coolers now that keep you from seeing what is in them.
sizzle 4y ago
https://archive.ph/AxyKF https://archive.ph/AxyKF

44 points by lxm 4y ago

Pharmacists usually don't fill prescriptions in the sense of counting out the pills into the bottles. Pharmacy technicians do that. Pharmacists have a lot more training and have to be able to discuss drug interactions and side effects with patients, etc. Article is paywalled but it is technicians, not pharmacists, that they are trying to "free up".

jmount 4y ago

In a non-compounding pharmacy (which is what most pharmacies are now days) I presume they are not making pills or capsules. So one could eliminate almost all of the chain if pills just came pre-packaged in containers closer to what is given to the consumer. I.e.: put this stuff in small jars at the factory with a machine.

klondike_ 4y ago
I never understood why drug manufacturers bother creating retail packaging for their drugs which the patient never sees. It just ends up in that generic orange bottle anyways. Why not cut out the middleman? Package them in common amounts at the factory, and then slap the doctor's instructions on the bottle.
- ghaff 4y ago
  One (common) prescription I get I just get a pre-packaged prescription bottle with a label slapped on. Not sure why my other equally common prescriptions aren't provided in the same form.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Presumably it’s much more cost effective to ship pills in containers that are much larger than increments of 30, 60, 90 etc. But paying a pharm tech to count it isn’t really free. I wish I knew too, because one of my scripts is like that as well and it’s only a 30 unit script.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And yet, we don't ship (most) food in bulk to supermarkets for local repackaging for consumer sale. Certainly it's cheaper for the manufacturer to ship in larger lots and have the retailer take care of the consumer sale, but it's usually more efficient overall to do at least most of the packaging at the factory.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- ourmandave 4y ago
  So I had to look up drug packaging and the second sentence on wikipedia says: Pharmaceutical packaging is highly regulated but with some variation in the details, depending on the country of origin or the region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_packaging
- throwaway098328 4y ago
  We already do this for Zithromax Z-Pak, Imitrex, Diflucan, and Medrol DosePak where the directions and prescribed quantity are always the same. For other drugs, in practice you get short supply on a drug, and can only fill a partial, or you have patients that only want a weeks worth. Another factor is the packaging adds extra cost, and it's cheaper to order a bulk 500 count bottle.
wikibob 4y ago
In the rest of the world pharmaceutical drugs come in end-user retail packaging. Primarily blister-packs. It’s mostly only the USA that has bulk packaging that is then counted out into bottles at the time of dispensing.
- throwaway098328 4y ago
  This is true, retail pharmacies order bulk packages, however in hospitals we order blister packs since unit dose is preferred.
  - hgsgm 4y ago

chevman 4y ago

Interesting it took them this long to purse the opportunity here. Something like 10-20 drugs make up like 80% of the maintenance meds dispensed in the US daily. Supply chain efficiencies like this were monetized 20+ years ago by most of the major PBMs/health plans (look at their 'mail order dispensing pharmacies' to see them in action). Doing a regionalized fulfillment play for your high volume geographies will likely save hundreds of millions in opex i'm guessing. Will be curious to see if WBA can scale as quickly as they want here. I'm sure there are many industry partners who could lend a hand :)

analog31 4y ago
Indeed, my health plan uses Express Scripts. It's been utterly foolproof.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Probably not a popular opinion, but I think we can do away with the vast majority of pharmacist. There are machines that can properly identify, sort, bottle, label, and provide prescriptions with little to no human intervention. All it seems the pharmacist does is pop bottles, fill prescriptions, file insurance claims over and over and over again.

zarzavat 4y ago
At least in the UK the pharmacist’s job is to check the prescription makes sense and isn’t going to poison the patient, and also to give crucial directions to the patient as they probably won’t read the leaflet. Seems like an important job.
- maxsilver 4y ago
  Except in a few very rare cases, we don't really have that in the US. In the US, the job of the pharmacist is mostly to deny patients their prescription medicine on an insurance companies behalf, or to deny a handful of the most vulnerable patients their prescription medicine because of personally-held extremist political beliefs. (/s, but like, only slightly)
  - shigawire 4y ago
    Very confidently incorrect. Doctors generally know very little about drugs and dosing - the pharmacist is the one protecting you from mixing inappropriate meds.
    - bigyikes 4y ago
      How can this be? Every prescription I’ve ever had was dosed by my doctor. How can you possibly prescribe a drug without knowing about drug dosing?
  - drugstorecowboy 4y ago
    This has been my experience exactly. I really like how the pharmacist who knows literally nothing about me, my diagnosis, life circumstances, family history etc... is supposed to be "the last line of defense" against all those silly doctors writing prescriptions that will kill their patients. It almost seems like the doctor might be the right person to decide what medications would work for me. If I didn't know better I might think that pharmacists inflate their importance to try and maintain their comfortable position with a nice salary for a job that a fancy soda machine could do.

ourmandave 4y ago

Once Walgreens proves it works, won't take long for every other pharmacy to follow.

hn2022hn2022 4y ago

Pharmacists are the last barrier for the patient to make sure the scripts written by the doctor/s don't kill the patient. Pharmacy techs are the ones that fill the scripts, but the pharmacist is ultimately responsible that it's correct. Pill filling robots are great if you're filling the same 10 scripts, but not very useful when dealing with complex and compounding scripts. My father was a pharmacist and we owned an independent pharmacy and I remember how often the scripts written by the doctor was so wrong and had it not been caught it would have killed the patient. Knowledge of drug interactions are key, but these days new pharmacists just look up online, so a pill filling robot could work.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
How can a person possibly be better at knowing the graph of drug interactions better than a program can? Like, isn't the human just going to have human error (like the doctor)?
- mrtesthah 4y ago
  Two humans looking at something are better than one.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    But a program could still have a much lower error rate.
    - nominusllc 4y ago
      Humans tell the program how to act, it's chicken and egg.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
        No, it's not. Humans tell a calculator how to calculate. It's never wrong. Humans (without a calculator) get math wrong constantly.

ck2 4y ago

Doesn't "free up" actually, eventually mean "fire"? Reduce employment costs? Like kiosks at fast-food places? Personally I'm sticking to mail-order rx for the rest of my life, pretty sure I caught covid at the pharmacy from the pharmacist who was refusing to mask. Imagine how filthy that checkout pad is at the pharmacy with every sick person touching it. Plus the prices are much more competitive.

FractalParadigm 4y ago
I don't see it as jobs lost, but jobs moved. You still need people to build these robots (or self-service kiosks), and you need people to maintain both hardware and software. One less pharmacist at the front-line is one more developer working on the software, or maybe that pays for two technicians instead. It's no different at the fast food level ether, it's just Industry 4.0 thinking in retail.
- petra 4y ago
  In general, costs are a decent estimate of the amount of work needed to do something. And we know that automation greatly reduces costs.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Yes, but we really should take a more optimistic view of automation. We now have an autonomous system that can do work a human previously had to waste their time and effort doing. The automation isn't the problem, it's capitalism. The gains from automation are realized by the owner which isn't the worker.
pyuser583 4y ago
I’ve automated away plenty of jobs. Even had my own job automated once. People don’t get fired. Worst case is the company stops hiring, and lets “natural attrition” take over. Companies spend a lot of money hiring people, and good workers are hard to find. If you’re happy with an employee, and they would prefer to stay instead of find a new job, then you have a good match. Don’t mess with that.

DoktorDelta 4y ago

Presumably this will prevent pharmacists from denying people their prescriptions on religious grounds, which would be a welcome change.

arthurcolle 4y ago
Who can't get pills?
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3565754-boycottwalgreens-trends-after-people-say-they-were-denied-birth-control-pills-condoms/ https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3565754-boycottwalgree...
- CharlesW 4y ago
  https://jezebel.com/non-pregnant-women-and-girls-are-being-denied-lifesavin-1849606994 https://jezebel.com/non-pregnant-women-and-girls-are-being-d...
hgsgm 4y ago
No because the process has to be supervised by a pharmacist.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Indeed, I fail to see why a pharmacist still couldn't refuse to turn on the pill filling machine anyway on religious grounds.
throwaway098328 4y ago
Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The prescription has to be reviewed by a pharmacist before it will even dispense through an automatic dispensing system.

duffpkg 4y ago

Healthcare executive 20 years, wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly... So long as this is used for routine filling of routine medications with low risks I think this can work. However it is also my opinion that Walgreens is a very, very poorly run organization. If you followed the Theranos story and documents you can see just how poorly. To the people saying pharmacists should not be involved at all, that is insane. Prescription errors are a very large source of preventable error that causes significant harm. Lots of error cannot be solved by computer because it lacks the information, like identity, drug and dosing errors. There are a lot of inputs that only a human can evaluate at dispensing time. This robotic filling, as I read it, does not necessarily prevent that. For reference, there are roughly ~110 million possible drug formulations (drug x dose x route etc) that are currently legally dispensable and distinct, in the US. Any drug can interact with any other, different dose x route x drug combinations may interact differently. A large set of the population is on dozens of drugs simultaneously. Taking into account the patients age/weight/race/level of sickness is important and makes the overall matrix very very large for raw computation. You might then say: well humans aren't good at a matrix that large either, that is in some ways true but humans are pretty good at detecting exceptional circumstances even though though they are not rotely walking that large key space. It is also true that there is a heavy weighting towards about 1,000 much more common drugs. It is not a new idea to add computers to interactions/dispensing/etc. It has been tried for 20 years, the outcome results of many efforts have been poor. A gold standard in pharmacy interactions is to maximize the amount of time between pharmacist and patient. Pharmacists aren't pill monkeys rotely stuffing things in bottles. They have important diagnostic, education and safety functions. Especially when they can see and interact with the patient. If there was any true broad economic incentive to be preventative pharmacists would take your vitals and temperature as well but currently our system does not make that economic.

mynameisvlad 4y ago
I disagree that it’s as complicated as you’re making it seem. There are only a few cases, relatively, where the “age/weight/race/level of sickness” is taken into account, and the prescribing physician would be the one that makes that call rather than a pharmacist. There’s also nothing that says that information couldn’t be transferred along with a prescription. It’s not like a centralized system wouldn’t have all that information about you, along with any other prescriptions and even non-prescription medications previously purchased with Walgreen’s (or any other pharmacy, they all do it) rewards card. A computer can also certainly be trained to identify outliers, and can certainly process complex interactions (not that there’s nearly as many or as varied and diverse as you’re making it seem) better than a human can, with the same data. At the end of the day there’s a finite number of these interactions, and while things like dosage might affect some, overall it’s groups of drugs that interact with each other which is generally looked at. Finally, at least for me, every time I get a prescription filled I get literally a 5 second conversation with a pharmacist at best. 10 seconds if it’s a new prescription with a particularly bad side effect. Suffice to say, I don’t think you’ve shown why exactly a human would be better than a machine at this job.

CompleteWalker 4y ago

This is interesting to me, as I try to change careers with no degree. I recently applied for the Walgreens Pharmacy Tech Apprenticeship.[^1] But, it seems like those jobs will be automated away soon too... I'm really looking for a tech support job, but options are limited in this small town. [^1]https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/pharmacy#grid-content-1-2 https://jobs.walgreens.com/en/pharmacy#grid-content-1-2

alphabettsy 4y ago
Pharmacy Techs should be relatively safe for awhile. In a busy pharmacy the techs do most of the work with a single pharmacist overseeing. Techs even operate the automated pill counters and such.

banana_giraffe 4y ago

My local pharmacy has a pill dispensing robot for the common prescriptions. This story seems to be more about centralizing the workload to some big locations than it is incidentally about the robots. It's going to be fun to be on the front line when this new chain borks up and some bignum% of your customers can't pick up their Rx for a few days.

greenyoda 4y ago

Archive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/AxyKF https://archive.ph/AxyKF

avnigo 4y ago

I honestly never quite understood why prescriptions in the US need to be literally filled, when in the EU, for example, you can just walk up with your prescription to any pharmacy and buy a prepackaged blister pack of the medicine you need. Not only do blister packs save so much waiting time — you never have to wait for it unless it's out of stock — but it also feels like there's less chance for anything to go wrong when manually handled by the pharmacist, factoring cross-contamination or incorrect filling, even though the pharmacists would either way be liable for it. Blister packs are verifiably sealed by the manufacturer, you're more likely to tell if they've been tampered with, you don't have to worry about moisture seeping into the excipient and interacting with the active ingredients, and they provide a visual representation of how many pills you have already taken, without needing to count pills in a bottle.

refurb 4y ago
It's mostly just how it's been done. You can still get a prescription "filled" by getting blister packs in the US. But if you think of drugs that are dispenses in the tens of thousands each month, like cholesterol medication - the amount of packaging the pharmacy would have to store would be massive.
- sithadmin 4y ago
  It's more than tradition and efficiency; the US doesn't have the supply chain trust issues that many other countries do when it comes to prescription drugs. There are plenty of parts of the world where a bottle of loose pills is going to be treated as suspect no matter who dispenses it to the patient. Giving consumers individual packages with counterfeit-deterrent measures and serialization that can be verified with the manufacturer as part of a valid production lot increases consumer confidence and makes counterfeiting more difficult.

linuxftw 4y ago

What a needlessly complex, pointless machine. Reminds me of the brick-laying robot.

nradov 4y ago
Then maybe you should build a simpler robot. There is a huge market in other pharmacies and you could make a fortune. Or maybe you have no clue about robotics, and don't understand the actual complexities involved.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  TCO will be far higher than traditional fills. This won't eliminate any positions, you'll still need people to handle the orders, load the hoppers, etc. You'll have people just standing around (best case) or fighting with the machine half the time (more likely). In all but the highest volume setting, this is a waste of money. That doesn't describe your neighborhood Walgreens. I'm confident that if you follow the money on this project, a board member of Walgreens owns part of the robotics company or is affiliated with a VC firm that's backing it. There's no way this isn't straight corporate legalized theft. Feel free to follow up with me in 5 years when everyone's totally forgot about this farce.

jordemort 4y ago

I've been a Walgreens customer since birth, but after multiple incidents of vaccination appointments getting blown off and lost prescriptions and test results I moved all my prescriptions somewhere else earlier this year. They can't keep their pharmacies staffed. Getting prescriptions filled by a robot sounds like it would feel unsafe, but getting prescriptions filled by an overworked skeleton crew felt pretty unsafe too. I hope the robot isn't from the same team that built those awful always-busted screens they have on their drink coolers now that keep you from seeing what is in them.

sizzle 4y ago

https://archive.ph/AxyKF https://archive.ph/AxyKF