AUTOMATED PHARMACEUTICAL MANAGEMENT AND DISPENSING SYSTEM

摘要

The system for automatically dispensing medications or other medical element s includes several vaults (80), each vault containing individual cartridges (138), which each contains packages of unit of use doses of a given medicati on or other medical supply. Each storage member includes an ejector which eject s selected medications/supplies to a supply trough. The packages in the trough are moved to a central collator (78), which dispenses them to a bin receptac le which has moved underneath the collator and which is identified with a patient. Information concerning medications/supplies for a particular patien t is stored in a database and used to determine the particular medications/supplies dispensed into a given bin (28). Bar coding (109) is us ed to maintain control over the bins. The filled bins are transferred to a medication cart (34) which can only be accessed as a result of a command signal. Overjacketed packages are used to aid dispensing.