Take a look inside this Walgreens facility in the Dallas area, where robots fill thousands of prescriptions for customers each day.
could be filled at the automated centers, said Rex Swords, who oversees facilities as Walgreens' group president of centralized services, operations and planning.
Each day, about 35,000 prescriptions are filled at the Dallas area facility — but eventually that number will increase to as many as 100,000 daily, Swords said. Pill bottles travel along the track. At one station, some get paired up with a patient's other medications or the rest of his or her 90-day medication supply. Scanners read bar codes, so printers can prepare paperwork and bags that customers will later pick up.
The facilities do not yet fill direct mail prescriptions, but that is on the program's roadmap, Swords said.drive the ready-to-pickup prescriptions to more than 500 As more prescriptions get filled by robots, he said pharmacists can take on other duties that Walgreens can bill to insurers or customers, such as testing and treating medical conditions like strep or the flu and writing prescriptions for people at risk of HIV.