Dec 30 2010
Kadena Air Base of Japan announced that it has deployed a robot called PharmASSIST Robotx at its pharmacy.
Airman 1st Class Roma Terry, a pharmacy technician with the 18th Medical Support Squadron at Kadena Air Base, begins running a check on the new pharmacy robot.
The robot will count medication for all prescriptions. The new robot stores the medications that are counted till it receives the electronic prescriptions from doctors.
The PharmASSIST Robotx makes sure that patients have received the correct medication, by using bar code scanning checks. It can generate a maximum of 240 prescriptions in one hour. For every 15 seconds, the robot will fill prescriptions and count medications, at the same time.
Before the deployment of the robot, the waiting time for patients to get prescriptions in the Kadena pharmacy was 30 minutes. But now, the waiting time has been decreased to approximately 20 minutes. The pharmacy will fill an average of 400 prescriptions per day. In addition to time saving, the robot provides patient safety and maximizes the efficiency of the pharmacy.