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Fully Automated Prescription Assembly Line Ramps up in U.K.

Said to be one of the world’s first, a fully automated line at Celesio UK assembles weekly trays of repeat prescriptions for LloydsPharmacy customers.

Celesio UK, a leading provider of integrated healthcare services to the National Health Service in the U.K., is pioneering a new model of prescription fulfillment services—“hub-and-spoke” dispensing—with the help of one of the world’s first fully automated prescription assembly lines. Celesio UK is part of Celesio Group, a leading international wholesale and retail company and provider of logistics and services to the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. Among its services in the U.K., Celesio operates more than 1,550 LloydsPharmacy community pharmacies.

In 2011, Celesio began working with Cornerstone Automation Systems, LLC (CASI) to develop an automated prescription assembly line in its Warrington, England, facility. The line’s primary function would be to assemble and label weekly blister trays, known as Community Dosage System (CDS) blister cards, for individual patients and ship them daily to LloydsPharmacy stores.

The CDS blister card, which has been widely adopted in the U.K. as a way to ensure patient adherence to medications, consists of a tray with 28 blisters, each capable of holding multiple tablets or capsules. The tray is divided into the seven days of the week, with four dosing occasions per day—morning, noon, teatime, and evening. A front cover attached to the spine of the tray is printed with patient information, pictures of the tablets or capsules, dosing information, and drug facts.

Explains Mark Gillett, Director, Pharmacy Channel for CASI, “You might have 17 different medications, each one with a different dosing pattern throughout the week. So you’ve got to get it exactly right, with every medication placed in the right blister for the right times and the right days. That’s where it gets complicated.”

With the hub-and-spoke concept, a single facility, such as Warrington, will act as the hub, supplying a number of pharmacies, or spokes, with assembled blister trays containing repeat patient prescriptions. “We currently produce the [multi-dose blister] cards in the pharmacy, which is hugely time-consuming and very reliant on manual operations, such as staff de-blistering pills, manually adding pills to the blister, printing off backing cards, etc.,” says Danny McNally, Head of Prescription Assembly Services for Celesio UK.

By automating blister-tray assembly at the hub, pharmacists at the spokes will be freed from the tedious task and will have more time to interact with patients as well as provide value-added services, such as treating minor ailments and injuries and administering vaccinations.

In its pilot phase, the new automated line is made up of multiple modular components from CASI that assemble the blister and frame, fill the trays with the pills, apply a backing card to the tray, and add the cover, at speeds to 15 trays/min.

At the first station, the frame of the blister tray—a paperboard card die-cut to accommodate the blisters and printed with the days of the week—is placed face down in a carrier containing 28 blister-shaped slots. Next, the blister piece is placed on top of the card, with the blisters fitting into the slots of the carrier, and the open sides of the blister facing up. These components are picked and placed into the carrier by a Fanuc LR Mate 200iD equipped with end-of-arm suction cups.

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