PRE2015 3 Groep3
Group Members
| Student ID | Name |
| 0903288 | J.J.P. Beckers |
| 0909421 | N.J.A. Frints |
| 0911264 | R.G. Hup |
| 0896239 | S.J.W. Maas |
| 0924760 | H.V.C. Ramchurn |
| 0923126 | G.M. van Vliet |
Pharmacy Service Help Robot
Nowadays, getting your medicine at the pharmacy takes more time than you have. Last years the waiting times at the pharmacy improved a lot. However, most people have a busy agenda these days. This results in the fact that the waiting times should be reduced even more. In addition, the society expects a 24-7 service. The current system cannot come up to these expectations.
To create a solution for this problem the idea of the Pharmacy Service Help Robot came up. The use of this robot will reduce waiting times a lot, because getting your medication via this robot will be a lot faster than via regular employees, especially in busy pharmacy. The robot will also be able to dispense your medicine any time of the day. The users will be able to retrieve the medicines that they need from the robot. This will apply both for prescription medicines and OTC medicines. Since most medicines require an explanation about the use, the robot will be capable to explain this to the users.
An important remark to this concept is that this robot will only be a tool that takes over a part of the pharmacist’s job. The Pharmacy Service Help Robot will NOT change anything to the current protocols.
Goal
General goal of the system The goal of this project is to introduce a system in the pharmaceutical industry to improve the experiences user have. With it the user will be able to retrieve their medicine faster and with more ease...........
Unemployment
Supporting the concept with unemployment arguments
Waiting time
It is generally known that waiting times at pharmacies can be long. To verify this statement, literature research and both qualitative and quantitative research has been done.
According to NIVEL (Netherlands Institute or Health Services Research) [1], the average waiting time in a pharmacy, both public and private, is 9.2 minutes, with a standard deviation of 6.0 minutes. This includes queueing with other customers and waiting for the pharmacist to fetch the customers medicine. While a large part of the respondents (41,6%) states that they have to wait for 5 minutes or less, a significant part of respondents (44,6%) states that they have to wait for 10 minutes or more.
While these numbers represent both public and private pharmacies, the public pharmacies do have longer waiting times, with an average of 18 minutes. Respondents that are using public pharmacies stated that a waiting time of 7.5 minutes is most desirable. It could therefore be concluded that a significant part of pharmacy customers, both private and public, do not meet this desired waiting time.
As the average waiting time at public pharmacies it significantly higher than the average of both public and private pharmacies, it could be concluded that private pharmacies do have significantly shorter waiting times than public pharmacies. This could be confirmed by the dutch Mediq pharmacies, which state that their average waiting time is 1.77 minutes [2].
[ Results of our own research / questionnaire not completed yet ]
The conclusion could be made that the waiting time at pharmacies is acceptable in a lot of cases, but does not meet the desired values in other cases. While private pharmacies generally provide fast services, public pharmacies do lack such rapidity. By implementing the concept of a robotic pharmacy service help, the waiting times could be reduced, as a robot is faster than humans regarding fetching medicine, performing the majority of checks and dispensing the medicine to customers.
Research
We had decided to conduct an interview with a pharmacist, so we could expand our understanding of the current pharmacy system. We managed to get an appointment with Ellen Jansen, who works at Pharmacy Fellenoord. On the 24th of February two group members (Chiel van Vliet & Sil Maas) went over to the pharmacy and asked Ms. Jansen some questions. Both the questions and the (translated) answers can be found here: Media:Pharmacistinterview.pdf.
One of the most important findings of the interview was that Ms. Jansen stated that 2 minutes is about the minimum time required for a pharmacist to get the requested medicine to the customer. Most medicine take notably more time to deliver to the customer. Ms. Jansen explained that most of this time is spent on checks; scanning medicine package, checking contents of medicine package, etc. This means that if we manage to automate these checks we could greatly improve on the time it takes to give a customer his medicine.
We also found that the current system of explaining to a customer how his/her medicine should be taken and when it should be taken, is far from perfect. Ms. Jansen explained that there are a lot of foreign people who come to pharmacy Fellenoord and often they speak neither Dutch nor English. This means that when the pharmacist gives the obligatory written and verbal explanation of the medicine, he can only really hope that the customer understood this. This is another problem that our idea could solve, for instance with an interface that has different language options. This way, non-Dutch speakers can still understand the explanation, because it is given in their native language.
Mr. Jansen also mentioned that she had noticed that were a lot of budget cuts coming through in the pharmacy sector. Budget cuts can easily lead to a lack of employees, which would worsen the current conditions (longer waiting times). Our new pharmacy robot could possibly solve this as well, simply by being more cost-efficient in the long run. Eventually the pharmacies will have lower costs without jeopardizing the quality of their work.
After the interview we finally got a chance to look at the "behind-the-scenes" part of the current pharmacy "vending machine", which is only used for repeated prescriptions. We already knew that this system sends a code via an SMS message to the customer, which he/she can type in to the touch screen of the machine to get their medicine. The user-interaction part is outside of the building, like a cash dispenser. However, now we got to see how the medicine is put into the machine. The same checks have to be performed before the medicine can be put in the machine. After the checks are done, the pharmacists scans the medicine package with a scanner connected to the machine and the SMS message is automatically send to the customer. Then the pharmacy selects a size of the box she wants to store the medicine in and the machine grabs a box of the right size and holds it behind a small window. The pharmacy then opens that window and puts the medicine in the box and lets the machine put the box back in its place in the storage area. Ms. Jansen explained that at larger pharmacies they have too many repeated prescriptions, so they keep the medicine in the machine for a limited amount of time.
USE
Users
The primary user of the pharmacy robot will be the pharmacy's customer or an acquaintance of the customer (if the customer can't pick up the medicine him-/herself). The secondary users will be the employees of the pharmacy, because they provide information on how to use the machine and put the medicine in the storage area. The tertiary users will be the manufacturers of the machine, because they will build, deliver and probably install the machine as well.
For the users the robot will be a great improvement of the current pharmaceutical system. They will have to wait less and they will be able to get their medicine and the explanation for it in private and in their native language.
Society
The effects that the pharmacy robot will have on society as a whole are not very clear, mostly because a lot of people rarely visit pharmacies to begin with. One could argue that if people have to wait less in pharmacies, they will get happier and therefore increase the overall societal happiness, but this is a little far-fetched.
The only negative effect that the robot might have is that some pharmacists will lose their jobs, because they're replaced by the machine
Enterprise
For the pharmaceutical companies it will probably be a very good investment, because it will lead to lower costs.
Implementation
How will this system work in the real world
The system
The complete system of the Pharmacy Service Help Robot will consist of multiple different parts, which will all be discussed here. The major parts are the storage system, the user interface and the controllers. Also, the system will physically be split up in the different parts. One part will be the machine itself with which the user interacts and the storage part will be completely shielded off from the user. As the base for the system, a ticket dispenser was chosen. It will consist of multiple parts, a touchscreen as interface, a speaker for audio support, a container in which the medicine is delivered, a payment system so the user is able to pay for their medicine and a scanner for the medicine codes.
Storage
There already exist automated systems capable of retrieving packages from a storage area. Since these technologies already exist, we will not focus on this in our project.
User Interface
UI related stuff
Controllers
Results
results form the project
Conclusion
conclusion of the project
Planning
On the right a Gantt-Chart is shown that we made in the beginning of the project to get a good overview of the planning. We tried to stay with it as much as possible.
Reflecting the planning
In week 1 the concept is devised. In the first instance, the problem had to be defined. When this was known, we came up with the solution for the problem: the concept. After developing the concept a little, research was required into i.a. current systems. The problem, the concept and the research needed to be presented in presentation 1 (week 2).
After presentation 1 we received feedback about our concept etc. The feedback had to be processed in week 2, before presentation 2 (week 3). An important part of the feedback was that the research should go deeper to support the problem better. Unfortunately, we could not finish this before presentation 2 because we wanted to interview a pharmacist and we wanted to distribute questionnaires. These things, however, took more time than expected. Also the concept had to be devised more and needed to become clearer.
During processing the feedback we already started to implement the robot. We also got the instructions for the wikipage after presentation 1, which resulted in the fact that we needed to start working on this as well. We started doing this dedicated in week 3. The feedback of presentation 2 did not get any better. As result, we needed to do a lot in week 3 to convince the teachers that the problem was a real problem and that the concept was great.
… The rest will be written after the next weeks …
Files
ToDo -> add file links
- Concept presentation
- Feedback presentation
References
- ↑ A. van den Elzen, J. Wijnands, I. Hermans, D. de Bakker, L. van Dijk. (2007). Receptenverkeer: naar de digitale snelweg?. NIVEL. Available from: <http://www.nivel.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/Receptenverkeer-naar-de-digitale-snelweg-2007.pdf> (26 february 2016).
- ↑ Mediq Apotheek. (n.d.). Wachttijden Mediq Apotheken. Available from: <https://www.mediq-apotheek.nl/content/510/wachttijden-mediq-apotheken.aspx> (26 february 2016).