For Canadian Pharmacies, AI Conquers a Mountain of Faxed Prescriptions

Applied Robotics’ WinRx Pharmacy System Platform Integrates DrFirst’s SmartPharmacy

LANGLEY, British Columbia, and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 25, 2023 – A ground-breaking partnership between DrFirst Healthcare Innovations and Applied Robotics Inc. will greatly improve patient safety and the efficiency with which pharmacies in Canada process faxed prescriptions. Based in British Columbia, Applied Robotics’ WinRx Pharmacy System platform is used by several hundred pharmacies in Canada.

The WinRx platform now integrates DrFirst’s comprehensive SmartPharmacy solution – a first in Canada. This will transform the Canadian pharmacy industry by saving valuable time for resource-strapped pharmacies and reducing human errors in data entry, as e-prescribing is in its early-adoption phase in the country. SmartPharmacy uses clinical-grade artificial intelligence that reads the computer-generated prescriptions faxed to pharmacies, interprets the free-text information on the fax image, and transforms it into codified data that automatically loads into the pharmacy software to streamline data entry.

Today, most pharmacy staff in Canada struggle daily when customers ask if their medication is ready. Answering customers’ questions requires navigating a computer screen filled with tiny images of digital faxes that are difficult to discern, sorted by the sender’s phone number, and do not display patient names or other identifying information. When processing these prescriptions, efficiency is further impacted because each fax typically presents information in a different order and uses various fonts and type sizes. Pharmacy staff must manually transcribe each faxed or paper prescription into their pharmacy management system (PMS), a multi-step process that can take several minutes and may be repeated hundreds of times each day. Read more >