The concept of autonomous pharmacies is becoming more popular. This week, startup Queue emerged from stealth, with a goal to create autonomous robotic driven pharmacies. Queue operates by taking sealed pill bottles in one end and produces filled prescription vials in the other. The company claims that it can “deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained.”
As one of Queue’s lead investors explains, “pharmacy has an infrastructure problem. While the industry has been forced to work around labor shortages, store closures and broken unit economics, [Queue] has taken a fundamentally different approach: automating the physical fulfillment layer itself…It has exceptional founders solving a massive, urgent problem with technology that can deliver outsized impact.”
Driving more confidence into the idea, Amazon Pharmacy announced a similar initiative last year with its automated kiosk concept at One Medical locations. The company explained that kiosks would have available the most commonly required prescriptions such as antibiotics, blood pressure medications and inhalers. As Hannah McClellan, vice president of operations at Amazon Pharmacy explained, “It’s an incredibly satisfactory experience. Taking our Amazon playbook, we see a way to improve on all those things [that are currently cumbersome with the pharmacy fulfillment process]. What we’re doing is starting from the customer and working backwards.”
If Amazon is chasing it, startups such as Amazon Queue can be somewhat reassured that they are likely onto a good idea.
Why is all of this important?
Because pharmacy fulfillment is truly a challenging cornerstone of the broader American healthcare system. A study by GoodRx found that nearly a third of Americans don’t fill their prescriptions due to high costs and access issues; many Americans are also impacted by pharmacy deserts, meaning they simply don’t have a pharmacy near them and have to commute long distances to get access to one. With the advent of these automated dispensing solutions, there may be an opportunity to increase access.
But important questions remain. For many communities, human pharmacists are not just purely dispensing labor; they advise, counsel and often provide valuable insights to their patients. For many Americans, especially in rural areas, their interactions with pharmacists are the closest they will come to a regular health check-up, again due to access issues and lack of care infrastructure in many communities.
Thus, the key aspect is that automation cannot be viewed as an opportunity to replace human expertise, but rather augment it to scale it even rurrher