Automated pharmaceutical management and dispensing system

Abstract

The system for automatically dispensing medications or other medical elements includes several groupings, i.e. vaults, of storage members, each vault containing approximately 100 individual cartridges, which each contain packages of unit-of-use doses of a given medication or other medical supply, such as syringes. Each storage member includes an ejector which ejects selected medications/supplies to a supply trough. The packages in the trough are moved to a central collator, which dispenses them to a bin receptacle which has been moved underneath the collator and which is typically identified with a particular patient. Information concerning medications/supplies for a particular patient is stored in a system database and used to determine the particular medications/supplies dispensed into a given bin. Bar coding is used to maintain control over the bins, and the medications, forming a closed information/control system. Particular medications and/or supplies which are not available in the automatic dispensing system are supplied from a supplemental medications cart which has been previously stocked with the correct additional medications by virtue of information from a control computer. The filled bins are transferred to a medication cart which can only be accessed as a result of a command signal after a particular patient and his/her associated bin have been matched. A nurse, having access to the correct bin and sector thereof, removes the medications from the cart and administers them to the patient.