Attention health care workers: Because hospitals, clinics, doctor’s offices, pharmacies and other health care recruiters have not been able to find enough of you to fill their job vacancies, you have hereby been replaced by robots. I may be partially kidding, but, as with many jokes, there is a grain of truth hidden within.

A Grady, Georgia pharmacy, motivated by customer complaints of extensive wait times to get their prescriptions filled, is adding a pharmacy technician “robot” to their payroll. The “robot” is actually a machine with pneumatic air-driven tubes and a mechanical arm that takes the prescription, prints a label for the bottle, spits out the pills and puts the bottle of medication on a conveyer belt for the pharmacist to double check for errors before giving to the patient.

The robot pharmacy technician cost $2.6 million and can stock 720 drugs and process 550 prescriptions per hour. The town officials estimate that the robot will be “on the job” by November of this year. The goal is to reduce customer wait times for prescriptions to a half hour (from up to two hour current wait times).

Long wait times in pharmacies can be a hardship on any customer. But for the elderly, who often have multiple medical issues as well as mobility problems, waiting for extended periods of time can be painful as well as distressing.

To relieve customer distress and improve overall pharmacy efficiency, human pharmacy technicians are in great demand in pharmacies, hospitals and clinics of all sizes and in cities and towns across the country. In the meantime the health care industry may have to employ robots, use online pharmacies and implement other miracles of technology invented to help (and hopefully not replace) technicians.

As a side note, the same Grady pharmacy has already used three smaller prescription dispensing robots some years ago, with the same goal of reducing customer wait times and providing excellent customer service – but those robots kept breaking down. Score one for the human pharmacy techs!

Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution