High - Torque Motors And Automation Speeds Pharmaceutical Dispensing

By MicroMo Electronics, Inc.

Lines at your local pharmacy will be a thing of the past, if ScriptPro (Mission, Kansas) has anything to say about it. The company's automated prescription dispensing systems can handle everything from tablets and capsules to packages of ointments, offering complete labeling and traceability, along with 99.7% counting accuracy. Leveraging high-efficiency, high-torque motors from MicroMo Electronics Inc., the ScriptPro family of dispensing robots is fast, robust, compact, and efficient enough to operate off of a single wall plug.

The average pharmacy dispenses many hundreds of prescriptions, creating customer delays and presenting constant staffing challenges. In an effort to streamline the process, ScriptPro has built a line of machines designed to store and automatically dispense everything from pills to unit-of- use medications like ointments and lotions. The base model, the SP 200, consists of a cabinet enclosing an array of 200 specially designed pill cells with dispensing chutes. A gantry arm fitted with a gripper can hold and convey a variety of pill vials to any of the cells in seconds. At the cell, a singulation system feeds pills into the chute, where an LED-based sensor counts each pill as it drops into the vial. The use of separate cells for each medication eliminates the risk of cross-contamination and a barcode/ scanner system ensures accuracy of dispensing and labeling; a final check by the pharmacist provides quality control.

When the ScriptPro design team set out to design the SP 200, the goal was to offer a machine that required no pharmacy modifications beyond simply replacing the existing shelves with the unit. The engineers focused on developing a cell array and robot with a footprint that matched that of a typical pharmacy shelving system. Equally as important was making the unit wall plug compatible. That meant focusing on efficiency throughout the design. Reliability and robustness were the final requirements, allowing ScriptPro to confidently offer 24/7 customer service.