Healthcare executive 20 years, wrote Hacking Healthcare for O'Reilly... So long as this is used for routine filling of routine medications with low risks I think this can work. However it is also my opinion that Walgreens is a very, very poorly run organization. If you followed the Theranos story and documents you can see just how poorly.<p>To the people saying pharmacists should not be involved at all, that is insane. Prescription errors are a very large source of preventable error that causes significant harm. Lots of error cannot be solved by computer because it lacks the information, like identity, drug and dosing errors. There are a lot of inputs that only a human can evaluate at dispensing time. This robotic filling, as I read it, does not necessarily prevent that.<p>For reference, there are roughly ~110 million possible drug formulations (drug x dose x route etc) that are currently legally dispensable and distinct, in the US. Any drug can interact with any other, different dose x route x drug combinations may interact differently. A large set of the population is on dozens of drugs simultaneously. Taking into account the patients age/weight/race/level of sickness is important and makes the overall matrix very very large for raw computation.<p>You might then say: well humans aren't good at a matrix that large either, that is in some ways true but humans are pretty good at detecting exceptional circumstances even though though they are not rotely walking that large key space. It is also true that there is a heavy weighting towards about 1,000 much more common drugs. It is not a new idea to add computers to interactions/dispensing/etc. It has been tried for 20 years, the outcome results of many efforts have been poor.<p>A gold standard in pharmacy interactions is to maximize the amount of time between pharmacist and patient. Pharmacists aren't pill monkeys rotely stuffing things in bottles. They have important diagnostic, education and safety functions. Especially when they can see and interact with the patient. If there was any true broad economic incentive to be preventative pharmacists would take your vitals and temperature as well but currently our system does not make that economic.