One of the most important aspects of being a pharmacist is the ability to dish out accurate amounts of required medication. When you have hundreds of patients to deal with everyday, the job gets tiring, tedious and mistakes are bound to happen. But not at the University of California, San Francisco. A robotic drug dispensary system is used to pack medication for patients that seek treatment at the university. Prescriptions are issued by doctors using computers which are then sent to the robots to pick out the medication. Barcodes are used to organize the various medicines in stock and the robots recognize them with the use of scanners. Nurses double-check the prescriptions after they have been packed by the robots before giving them to the patients. This drug dispensary system is efficient and accurate, and makes life easier for everybody. Not to mention, it lowers the labor costs of hospitals as it is probably cheaper to maintain the machines in the long run than to keep a large team of pharmacists around to do the same job. If they can skip the double checking step or replace nurses with checking robots instead, it’s probably safe to say that in the future, we’ll have hospitals and clinics can function with a minimal amount of human staff. Hit the break to watch the drug sorting robot in action:
Filed in . Read more about California, Machine, Medicine, Robot and University.