Innovation intros RxCollect robotic collation tech for mail-order, central fill pharmacies

JOHNSON CITY, N.Y. — Pharmacy technology solutions company Innovation on Wednesday introduced RxCollect, a robotic prescription collation technology that allows central fill and mail-order pharmacies using Single Piece Flow Processing to automate the collection of patient-specific group, as well as multi-vial orders.

“When it comes to increasing efficiency and reducing waste in high-volume prescription environments, Lean manufacturing’s single piece flow typically wins out over filling prescriptions in batch mode,” Innovation COO Tom Boyer said. “With that in mind, we invented RxCollect as a downstream automated collation solution for high-volume pharmacies filling patient orders in a continuous, single piece flow mode of operation. By filling and collating prescriptions individually, as they’re processed, you eliminate wasted idle time, increasing labor and machine utilization and allowing for greater throughput or shorter shifts.”

The RxCollect technology is made up of a Fanuc LR Mate 200iD/7L robot and 50 tubular collation queues, each of which can accommodate as many as five 60-dram vials or bottles. RxCollect can assign multiple collation queues for a patient’s order if it exceeds five vials or bottles. Collation occurs after each prescription has been filled and RxCollect scans the label of each vial or bottle as the order moves to via conveyor to the collation area and into a pre-selected collation queue. Once the last item in a patient order has been collated the vials and bottles are released into an awaiting carrier unit, or tote, which is then released to the next destination. Each collation queue has an optical sensor to make sure items release as expected.

RxCollect’s modular, compact footprint can be integrated into any new high-volume pharmacy design, or into any existing high-volume pharmacy system —whether an Innovation system or not —with minimal disruption of operations.