Top 6 Jobs That Will Be Lost To Robots

Pharmacists

The next time you drop off a prescription order, you might see a robot behind the counter.

The UCSF Medical Centre recently launched an automated, robotics-controlled pharmacy at two UCSF hospitals with really good results. Once the computers receive a medication order from physicians and pharmacists, the computers are connected to robots who analyze the prescription order and sort through the cabinets in order to dispense either packages or individual doses of pills and drugs.

Machines assemble doses onto a thin plastic ring that contains all the medications for a patient for a 12-hour period, which is bar-coded. This helps a lot with efficiency at large hospitals that require several workers to keep track of patients’ medications.

The automated system also compounds sterile preparations of chemotherapy and non-chemotherapy doses and fills IV syringes or bags with the medications. This robotic system, which was tested and launched over the past year, so far has prepared 350,000 doses of medication without error.