Researchers in China are developing an unattended intelligent hospital pharmacy system that can dispense seal boxes of prescription drugs. Details are reported in the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology. Haifei Si, Xingliu Hu, Yizhi Wang, Xiang Luo, and Mingming Huang of Jinling Institute of Technology, in Nanjing, Jiangsu and Zhen Shi of Harbin Engineering University, in Harbin, Heilongjiang, explain how their system cuts patient waiting times for prescription collection by two-thirds (66 percent).
Hospital pharmacies are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of prescriptions that have to be dispensed on a given day and long delays commonly occur between the time a medicine is prescribed for a patient and it being dispensed. Moreover, delays at the pharmacy on the day of discharge are a common problem for waiting to go home. An automated, intelligent system could reduce the pressure on pharmacists dealing with a large number of patients and many prescriptions. The team writes that there are tens of thousands of hospitals in China but only a couple of hundred have automation in their pharmacies, so addressing the problem more widely could potentially benefit many more people.
The system uses an Automated Guided Vehicle with an optimised path strategy that takes control input from the prescription software to retrieve the boxed medicines from storage. The team suggests it is something of a breakthrough in hospital dispensing. It is reliable, stable, and low maintenance.
Si, H., Hu, X., Wang, Y., Shi, Z., Luo, X. and Huang, M. (2020) ‘Research on design of unattended intelligent pharmacy system’, Int. J. Computer Applications in Technology, Vol. 64, No. 2, pp.197–207.