A robot arm fills the recipes in a micro filling center in Walgreens.
With kind permission: Walgreens
As a fighting drugstore chains, they work to regain their reason, Walgreens doubles with automation.
The company extends the number of retail stores operated by its microfillment centers and in which robots fill out thousands of recipes for patients who take medication for the treatment or treatment of diabetes, high blood pressure and other diseases.
Walgreens would like to release the time for the pharmacy staff, reduce their routine tasks and remove inventory waste. With less prescription fillings, employees can interact directly with patients and carry out more clinical services such as vaccinations and tests.
Walgreens introduced the robot centers for the first time in 2021, but in 2023 the expansion was in order to focus on collecting feedback and improving performance at existing locations. After more than a year failure of upgrades, including new internal tools, the company said that it was ready to expand the reach of this technology again.
Walgreens said CNBC that his 11 microfillment centers can serve more than 5,000 business by the end of the year, compared to 4,800 in February and 4,300 in October 2023. From February, according to Walgreens, the centers processed 40% of the volume of provisions in February.
This leads to around 16 million recipes that are filled on the various websites every month, the company said.
The renewed automation boost comes when Walgreens is prepared to go privately with Sycamore partners in about 10 billion US dollars, which is expected to close at the end of the year.
The deal would limit a turbulent chapter for Walgreens as a stock corporation, which is characterized by a rocky transition from pandemic, the reimbursement rates of the pharmacy, weaker consumer expenses and violent competition from the pharmazie refund ratio CVS healthPresent Amazon and other retail giants.
Like CVS, Walgreens has shifted from opening new business to close hundreds of underperformance locations to support profits. Both companies run to remain relevant, since online retailers increasingly choose customers and patients to quickly deliver according to traditional pharmacy visits.
The changes also follow the increasing dissatisfaction among the pharmacy employees: In 2023, burnout and chronically lower employment were spent on the chains to examine their operating models again.
Walgreens said that the investment in robot pharmacy has already paid off.
So far, micro-fulfillment centers have saved savings of around $ 500 million by reducing excess inventory and increasing efficiency, said Kayla Heffington, Vice President of the Pharmacy Operative Model. Heffington added that shops that use the facilities give 40% more vaccines than those that are not.
“At the moment you are the backbone that helps us to compensate for part of the workload in our shops and obviously give more time for our pharmacists and technicians to spend time with patients,” said Rick Gates, Chief pharmacy officer from Walgreens.
“It gives us much more flexibility to reduce the costs, increase care and increase the speed of therapy – all of these things,” he said.
Gates added that the centers of Walgreens provide a competitive advantage, since independent pharmacies and some competitors have no centralized support for their business. Despite it, WalmartPresent Albertsons And Kroger Have tested or are currently using your own microfillment systems to output food items and other recipes.
Micro-fulfillment centers are equipped with their own risks, such as: B. a strong dependence on demanding robotics that can lead to disruptions if errors occur. However, the facilities become an integral part of retail because they offer the cost savings and their ability to rationalize work processes, reduce the burden on employees and deliver customers to customers faster.
How Walgreens Micro Full Fillment works
In a Walgreens micro-filling center, which contributes to filling thousands of recipes.
With kind permission: Walgreens
When a Walgreens single-handed pharmacy receives a recipe, the system determines whether it should be filled in this place or directed to a nearby microfillment center. Maintenance medication or prescription drugs that are regularly taken for the treatment of chronic health states, and after refilling that do not require immediate collection, are often sent to microfillment.
At the core of each facility there is a highly automated system that uses robotics, conveyor belts and barcode scanners, among other things, to fill recipes. The operations are supported by a team of pharmacists and other experts.
Instead of employees who fill out the recipes by hand in the shops, pill bottles move through an automated and carefully choreographed assembly line.
Pharmacy technicians fill canister with medication for robot pods to do without, and pharmacists check these canisters to ensure that they are correct. Yellow robotic arms grip for a marked prescription bottle and adhere to a canister that precisely spends the specific medication for this bottle.
Robot arms fill the recipes in a Walgreens micro-full-full center.
With kind permission: Walgreens
Certain regulations are filled at separate trading stations, including inhalators and anti -Bab Till packs. Each recipe is then sorted and the delivery to the locations in retail savings is packed for the final collection.
There are further measures for security and security measures throughout the process, said Ahlam Antar, a registered group leader of a microfillment center in Mansfield, Massachusetts.
For example, the robot pods automatically block and signal an error with a red-or-colored light when a worker creates a canister on the wrong donor and prevents the wrong pills in a recipe.
According to Sarah Gonsalves, a high -ranking certified pharmacy technician at the Mansfield location, the proper training of employees in the centers is to ensure the accuracy and safety of the patients.
She said a central part of her role was to ensure that technicians can correctly perform the various tasks in the process.
Improvements to robot recipe fillings
Antar, who has been working at the Mansfield site since its opening in 2022, said that Walgreens had improved after he had considered feedback from shops and patients during the break. This includes setting up new roles that are required to support the process on the website, e.g. B. a training manager for all 11 locations.
According to a Walgreen spokesman, the facilities also plan to become too large a bottle too large after changing the use of smaller prescription vials. They said that the centers would enable more recipes to send per order and reduce the costs.
A robot arm fills a prescription bottle in a Walgreens microfillment center.
With kind permission: Walgreens
Heffington said that the automated locations have contributed to reducing the costs for the fulfillment of Walgreen's recipe by almost 13% compared to the previous year.
She said Walgreens had increased the prescription volume by 126% compared to the previous year and has now filled up more than 170 million recipes annually. The company hopes to increase this number to 180 million or even more.
Heffington added that Walgreens implemented new internal tools to pursue the work in all 11 centers and to provide real -time data about where a patient's recipe is in the microfillment process.
“When a patient called the shop and said: 'Hey, can you tell me where my recipe is today?' [Workers] Can do this with great specificity, “said Heffington thanks to the new tools.
Despite the company's progress, Gate said that more work has to be done with microfillment centers.
For example, he pointed out the possibility of shipping recipes directly towards the patient's door towers instead of relying this burden on retail stores.
“It is currently only step one,” he said.
According to some reports, further improvements in institutions may be necessary. For example, Wral News in April reported that some customers in a Walgreens business in Garner, North Carolina, say that they only receive prescription fillings, with several pills missing, or their medicine is delayed.
Personnel staff of the pharmacy papers see advantages
A customer sees goods for sale in a Walgreens business in the Hollywood district in Los Angeles.
Christopher Lee | Bloomberg | Getty pictures
Before Brian Gange's business in Arizona relied on an automated facility, he went to the pharmacy every morning, knew that a massive list of recipes was waiting in his work to be filled for the day.
With the help of microfillment, this list is now considerably smaller every day.
“We don't have to spend so much time for these repetitive performance tasks,” he told CNBC. “It really takes great weight from our shoulders.”
Gange said that he and his team have time to step behind the pharmacy and to interact with the customers of face to face, to answer questions, to give advice, to carry out health tests or to give vaccines.
This type of attention can make the difference for a patient.
For example, Gange remembers to achieve a patient's blood pressure for five minutes, although he was overwhelmed by tasks a few years ago while working at another location in Walgreens. In the end, he sent this person into the emergency room because their blood pressure was “out of the charts”.
The wife of this patient visited the pharmacy the next day to thank Gange, and said her husband “would probably not be here today” without this test test.
“I shouldn't have to ask myself whether I have this five or ten minutes to check blood pressure for a patient,” said Gange. “Micro Fullment and centralized services are really what enable us to do this time.”
“That really enables us to better provide them,” he added.
