JOHNSON CITY, N.Y. — Moose Pharmacy has boosted the efficiency of the pharmacy at its Mt. Pleasant, N.C., store with the deployment of an Innovation RxSafe 1800 robotic inventory control system.

The pharmacy automation provider said Monday that Moose Pharmacy, with five locations in North Carolina, sought to streamline the workflow, increase patient safety, improve inventory management, reclaim pharmacy floor space at its Mt. Pleasant store, as well as free up pharmacy staff to provide medication adherence services to patients. Moose Pharmacy is a long-time customer of North Carolina Mutual Drug for its medications.

“We’re continually evaluating how to improve our business and customer service through the use of state-of-the-art technology. The RxSafe has had an immediate impact on staff efficiency, security and quality control,” explained Whit Moose, manager and co-owner of Moose Pharmacy. “The system replaced three shelving bays, which eliminated the need to restock those shelves, and freed our staff from having to retrieve and return stock while filling prescriptions, both of which are huge time savers. It also added an extra level of security for our C-II dispensing and quality control of our entire filling process, basically eliminating any opportunity for dispensing errors.”

Moose noted that with the RxSafe 1800 the pharmacy is making headway with inventory management and that the system complements its current pharmacy automation suite of robotic dispensing, adherence packaging, and pharmacy management and IVR systems. The RxSafe seamlessly integrates with the store’s PioneerRx pharmacy management system. The pharmacy also employs the VOW IVR system for refill processing.

The Mt. Pleasant pharmacy is the original Moose Pharmacy, which opened in 1882, in the same building and location where the original store stood.

“Our overriding goal is to make our pharmacy back-ends as efficient as possible so our teams can focus on providing our communities with high quality, patient-facing services, especially adherence services,” Moose added. “In just a few short weeks, the efficiency gains from the RxSafe have freed up one of our technicians to work the majority of their time on our adherence program.”

The RxSafe 1800 is a scalable, high-density, robotic inventory control system that holds up to 5,400 native packaged stock bottles in a three-tower system. Though the RxSafe 1800 is driven by robotics, it is not a vial-filling robot. The system stores, retrieves and maintains inventory to the pill without any repackaging.