European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

DETAIL GUIDE FOR PHARMACY AUTOMATION AND AUTOMATED MACHINES IN PHARMACY

Shireen Begum*, Alina Sadaf and Amena Begum

ABSTRACT

In pharmacy system various process such as tablet counting, iv dosage fillings, medicine dispensing etc. were done manually. The manual method used many workers, extra time in completion of the work, errors were common in these processes. With increase in the demand of more medicine in the current world, the production and dispensing of the medicines has increased in large amount and this increase has made the need for the introduction of automation in the production and dispensing unit of pharmacy system. Pharmacy automation is defined as a mechanical system that performs operations involving the storage, packaging, dispensing, or distribution of medications while enabling control of the operation and electronic documentation of transactions. Pharmacy automation involves the mechanical process of handling and distributing medication. Any pharmacy task that may be including counting small objects (e. g. tablets, pills, capsules); measuring and mixing powders and liquids for compounding; tracking and updating customer information in databases (e.g. personally identifiable information (PII), drug monitoring, medical history, drug interaction risk detection), and inventory management. Pharmacy automation has primarily been incorporated into hospitals, community, and mail-order settings. Automation has many advantages with it such as reducing errors, increasing the accuracy, speed and documentation. Various pharmacy technologies are involved in pharmacy automation. They are Clinical decision support system (CDSS), Picture archiving and communication technology (PACS), Radio frequency identification (RFID), Automatic dispensing machines (ADMS), Electronic material management (EMM), Electronic health record (HER), Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and bar coding. Different automated machines involved in pharmacy automation are tablet counters, iv compounding systems, medicated dispensers etc.

Keywords: Pharmacy automation, pharmacy automation technologies, medicated dispencers.