The world's first fully automated pharmacy

According to Interesting Engineering, Queue, a robotics company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, is introducing an automated pharmacy that will receive unsealed medicine bottles from the manufacturer and create prescriptions with minimal human intervention. According to Queue, this technology aims to reduce operating costs, improve accuracy in the dispensing process and expand services by placing automated pharmacies near where patients need them.

Unlike a conventional pharmacy that specializes in supporting individual claims, Queue's system integrates dispensing, verification and fulfillment into a single automated process. Medicines are introduced into the system in sealed bottles, then robots, computer vision and automated processing manage storage, counting, dispensing and verification before dividing them into multiple boxes ready for patient use.

Currently, Queue's pharmacy supports 250 of the most popular prescription drugs in the US. This system can dispense a bottle of 60 pills every 30 seconds, or 600 pills/minute in full configuration. According to Businesswire, automated pharmacies can reduce prescription fulfillment costs by 96% compared to traditional pharmacies. Modular design makes it easy for pharmacies to deploy at retail establishments, hospitals, clinics and dispensaries.

Queue has opened a commercial pharmacy prototype to test the technology in real-world conditions. The company's automated pharmacy enters the market when the US pharmaceutical industry is facing increasing challenges. While pharmacists' workloads have increased, staffing shortages have become acute with the number of pharmacy graduates dwindling, raising concerns about the potential for errors in prescription fulfillment. Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, found that nearly a third of pharmacies in the US have closed since 2010.

Queue aims to solve the challenge by replacing the labor-intensive prescription fulfillment process with automated robots. Queue has raised $12.6 million to accelerate system development and deployment.

However, the unresolved issue is whether regulators and patients will trust machines to check prescriptions. According to The Next Web, state laws in the US require licensed pharmacists to perform the final inspection step before the medicine reaches the patient. Queue faces convincing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that the company's artificial intelligence and computer vision inspection processes work as well as humans.