Amazon Installing Automated Medication Kiosks At Clinics

Amazon Pharmacy will begin offering prescription pickup kiosks at its One Medical clinics starting in Los Angeles this December, allowing patients to collect common medications like antibiotics and inhalers without waiting for delivery. Reuters reports: The kiosks will be the first in-person pick-up service offered by Amazon Pharmacy, which has been providing prescription services primarily by delivery, said Hannah McClellan Richards, a vice president at Amazon Pharmacy. One Medical offers a membership structure that allows patients to access primary and urgent care at a subscription fee of $199 annually. Patients without a membership are still able to book an appointment and would be able to use the kiosk, the company said.

Richards said in an interview that the company plans to expand the kiosk model outside of California in 2026 and is in talks with external health systems to introduce the machines through partnerships. Amazon does not plan to offer medicines that must be refrigerated, such as GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, or more tightly regulated prescriptions like controlled pain medicines through the kiosk. Inventory for each kiosk will be tailored to the provider, and patients would be able to consult a company pharmacist virtually, Amazon said in a press release.

Doctors are shitbags.

[Seven Spirals]

Doctors do everything they can to hold on the the prescription-power monopoly but they are mostly terrible at their jobs and ripe for AI and other tech to replace them. They need to be taken down several notches. They aren't as smart or effective as they try to project and they did everything they could to censor folks during CV19. They also were often advocates of lockdown camps and other authoritarian shit. I didn't forget. Mother fuck those guys.

Anything that takes their power away I'm all for it. Let

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[Anonymous Coward]

Take your meds, we don't care where you get them from but please take them.

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[MacMann]

Anything that takes their power away I'm all for it. Let robot doctors and robot perscriptions take over 100% as far as I'm concerned. If you've been to a doctor recently and been given your 8-minutes with them as they try to use it all up by talking and giving you advice before they even know what's wrong and then hustling you out the door, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

There's been a couple times in my life where I had a bad enough cold/flu/whatever that I had a member of my family demand I go see a physician. One time I had the physician announce I had a cold, as if I didn't know that, then told me to take Tylenol and Ibuprofen. I wasn't exactly happy to hear that since I was expecting something prescribed but I went along because I was much younger and stupider then. Another time I don't recall so well as I was even further out of thinking straight and I was again to

Hmm...

[fahrbot-bot]

Amazon Installing Automated Medication Kiosks At Clinics

I can see the ad now...

Kiosk: I have processed that you are in distress, and I have prescribed anti-depressants. Compliments of the Galactic Federation - I mean, Amazon.

Patient: [consumed the pills] I feel better

Kiosk: Your debt is 7,000 Fed credits - I mean dollars. Report to the Ministry of Employment and you will be assigned a function.

Patient: I got a job!

Good!

[Cyberax]

Right now I need to go to a pharmacy, drop off my prescription (if it's not electronic), and then wait for somebody to count out pills into a box. And there must be a pharmacist present in case I have questions.

And all of this even if you're buying a pack of antibiotics for an ear infection.

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[cusco]

The medical field is ripe for a technology disruption. Already robots and a trained AI can scan biopsy slides faster and more accurately than a human pathologist for several different diseases, can read scans better than most radiologists, and the only reason why most pharmacists still have a job is the inertia of the insurance cartels.

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[schematix]

Building a glorified vending machine is not disruptive. This is actually a head scratcher given amazon's clear market leading logistics. They can't make any money doing this. Pharmacists are not the enemy. They do serve an important role in making sure people get what they are supposed to. The support staff in pharmacies is shockingly incompetent at doing simple tasks correctly every time.

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[Cyberax]

It's not disruptive, but it'll help a bit. And yes, pharmacists are important. But do you need them for ALL orders? Even if you're doing a routine refill for a medication that you've been using for years. Or you're picking up an antibiotics prescription. I'm not saying that people should just buy antibiotics without prescription, I'm saying that there's no real need to involve pharmacists in these simple transactions.

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[MacMann]

The medical field is ripe for a technology disruption. Already robots and a trained AI can scan biopsy slides faster and more accurately than a human pathologist for several different diseases, can read scans better than most radiologists, and the only reason why most pharmacists still have a job is the inertia of the insurance cartels.

We'd still need people trained in these medical fields to cross check the work and provide training data. Maybe we'd need fewer of them but we'd need people knowledgeable enough to check that the AI isn't hallucinating, and to operate the machines in a manner to not screw up the results. The machines will need to be maintained, and this would still require people that knew something of the subject to do that if only to recognize when the machines started to screw up and give bad reports.

What needs to happ

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[havana9]

Vending machine outside pharmacies [medybox.it] are quite common in Italy. For the specific case of antibiotics you must have a doctor's prescription to get one, so you have to ask the pharmacist for it, also if you have the prescription made by your GP, antibiotics are free.

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[nospam007]

The US pharmacy model is oddly archaic: pharmacists still hand-count tablets from large stock bottles, repackage them, and print individual labels.

This labor-intensive process adds time, wages, and liability, and it’s one reason for higher dispensing costs, though not the main driver of overall drug prices, which mostly stem from manufacturer pricing, patent law, and the fragmented insurance system.

Most of Europe, Japan, and Canada use "unit-dose*" or "blister-pack systems", where drugs arrive factory

The harm of big pharma drugs

[buck-yar]

Why does no one talk about the harm from Big Pharma drugs? How they get people hooked on SSRIs or other drugs with arguable effectiveness.

Psychiatric drugs are reported to be about 50% more effective in clinical trials funded by the drug’s manufacturer than when trials of the same drug are sponsored by other groups, new research shows (src: Tamar Oostrom)

Or how about any drug from the profiteers? Take your pick... how about antibiotics? Looks like they mess people up too. Big surprise.

Antibiotics May Trigger Mitochondrial Dysfunction Inducing Psychiatric Disorders https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]

Almost everything we've been told by big pharma is false or worse, a lie.