Traces of pharmaceuticals can be traced back to the middle of the 19th century. century. At the end of the 19 century, when pharmaceutical processes were manual and it took several people to produce one bottle of medicine. Today the situation is somewhat different, ubiquitous automation has also entered the field of pharmacy, where robots and artificial intelligence systems perform 40-50 production jobs that include packaging, sorting and many other operations.
The advantages of automation in the pharmaceutical industry are numerous – production speeds up, the space for human error is reduced, the volume and mass ratios of the elements in medicines are more precise than ever before, the packaging is more precise… However, despite all these positive aspects, many pharmaceutical companies are delaying the transition to automatic production method for one obvious reason – one production error can destroy a production batch that may contain millions and millions of tablets or vials of medicine.
If the fault is detected, there will be huge economic losses where one batch of production can cost millions and millions of dollars, euros, pounds, choose your currency. If the error is not detected in time, even worse consequences are possible where faulty drugs are placed in the healthcare system, which can pose a potential risk to consumers.
However, the pharmaceutical industry has become increasingly focused on revenue in recent years, and revenue generated by hand cannot match that provided by an automated system. More and more pharmaceutical factories are switching to automatic production systems to offset and reduce production costs, while the risk from the previous paragraph increases. Today’s automatic systems are much more stable, more precise, alarms and warnings report any production error that can be corrected immediately, and are much more reliable.
In addition, automation provides great relief in logistics and administrative tasks. The delivery of medicines today is much easier due to automatic production batch records, logistical errors can be much more easily spotted and corrected, allowing medicines to reach the people who need them most quickly.
However, automation in this industry will never be able to completely replace humans, but in the future it will be needed more than ever. The reason is simple – the beginning of the production of personalized medicines. Today, all people with the same diagnosis are still given the same drugs regardless of differences in genetics, age, sex, level of disease, etc. Personalized medicine has not yet reached its full potential, which will be automatically enabled by systems for analyzing millions of individual genomes, medical records, family diseases, researching a specific type of disease in a short time and will enable. This method of treatment could bring the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of rare diseases where a personalized approach is more important than in some everyday diseases.
Pharmacy automation has a bright future, but still many companies have not decided on their introduction. Their concerns are usually cost of implementation, complexity of use and staff acceptance. However, such systems are cheaper and more available over time and are easier to use, which makes them more attractive to all pharmaceutical companies, regardless of their size.