The Robot

picture of a large automatic pharmacy robotThe robot by Swisslog, a healthcare technology company based out of Buchs, Switzerland, consists of five parts. The largest acts as the repository for all the drugs in the hospital called the DrugNest. Connected to this is the PickRing which is a list of medications for the patient in the order they need to be administered and the radio frequency (RF) ID bar code that goes along with it. On the opposite end connected to the DrubNest is the PillPicker where the drugs are dispensed. The last two components can be added in sequence at the end of the PillPicker to package pills into a box, AutoBox, or a liquid item, AutoPhial, which both recreate the RFID tag associated with the drug (Swisslog, 2009).