A large expansion of the Intermountain Health Supply Chain Center in Midvale, Utah included a new state of the art pharmacy fulfillment center, which will save patients money and them get their prescriptions faster.
Many prescriptions that used to be filled by hand are now prepared using and automated conveyor belt and robots which can fill 2,500 prescriptions per day. The way it works is small containers move on the conveyor belt, and each container is a patient’s order. If the patient has any solid pill medications, the robot will fill and label the bottle and drop it into the bin.
As the bucket moves along the conveyer, caregivers then load up other prescriptions needed to be done by hand, like diabetes test strips or refrigerated medications. The final step is verification from a pharmacist before it gets packed and shipped off.
“Moving from a manual process to an automated one improves our ability to get medications out the door,” said Mason Hilton, community pharmacy director at Intermountain Health. “The expanded capacity frees up time an increases space to do more specialized care like on-demand pharmacy.”
Intermountain’s on demand services launched in 2022 and helps patients access specific low risk prescriptions and self-administered lab tests without having to see a doctor. It’s helping patients get better access to things like birth control, smoking cessation medications, naloxone, and others.
This innovative technology and storage capacity allows the pharmacy fulfillment center to go from filling 360,000 medications annually to 650,000. All this while speeding up the time it takes for a patient to receive their medications from two to three days to under 40 hours and many being filled the same day.
The expansion allowed Intermountain’s specialty pharmacy to move from its old location across town to now be under the same roof. Saving time, money, and reducing driving miles. The pharmacy specialty and home delivery teams are currently serving patients in 48 states.
About Intermountain Health
Headquartered in Utah with locations in six states and additional operations across the western U.S., Intermountain Health is a nonprofit system of 34 hospitals, 400 clinics, medical groups with some 4,600 employed physicians and advanced care providers, a health plans division called Select Health with more than one million members, and other health services. Helping people live the healthiest lives possible, Intermountain is committed to improving community health and is widely recognized as a leader in transforming healthcare by using evidence-based best practices to consistently deliver high-quality outcomes at sustainable costs. For more information or updates, see https://intermountainhealthcare.org/news.
