Prescription vending machine for UK

A Canadian company will trial a remote pharmacy dispensing machine at UK hospitals later this year.

PharmaTrust will provide its MedCentre product – which is a similar to a vending machine but provides patients with a face-to-face video link with a registered pharmacist before securely dispensing medicines – to a five as yet unnamed hospitals.

The machine uses prescriptions electronically saved on a server or paper prescriptions fed into it by the patient. These are scanned so a pharmacist in a call centre or in another location can see the details on the prescription.

The pharmacist then engages in a consultation with the patient to ensure that the medication is correct and that they do not have any allergies.

Peter Suma, president and chief information officer of PharmaTrust, told E-Health Insider: “The machine uses robotics to identify a bottle or jar or whether the medication needs to come from the fridge and then checks the data in a number of ways.

"For example, it makes sure the drugs are the correct weight or have not expired. The patient enters payment and receives a receipt and medication advice and the pharmacist can then confirm its release.”

The pharmacist can see every stage of the process through a tiny camera inside the machine to ensure that the drugs are correct and have not come unsealed. The pharmacist can also send the drugs to a bin if, for any reason, they decide they should not be given.

David Miller, chief pharmacist of City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, said: “It’s about centralising the supply process and decentralising staff so they can take on more patient facing roles.

“In my trust we’re not looking to cut staff but the staff that we do have are wanted on wards and also in the dispensing process and they can’t be in two places at once.”

According to Peter Ellis from PharmaTrust, the medical act surrounding the remote supply of medications is very similar in the UK to Canada.

Ellis said: “There is an exemption where you are allowed to supply precsriptions remotely in hospitals here [in England] and then we hope to get the legislation in the community setting changed too.”

The machines can contain up to 2,500 different drugs depending on their size and are likely to cost £40,000-£50,000.

“The security is similar to that of an ATM. We have had security consultants working on it and many of us come from a banking background. It has a think steel skin and in the two and a half years it has been used nobody has tried to break into it. All the data is encrypted," Ellis said.

Link: PharmaTrust