This caused me to muse on healthcare informatics (in general) and pharmacy robotics (in particular) and consider where we might be in the evolution in comparison to the automotive mileposts I saw at this museum. I came to the conclusion that we may well be closer to these old buggies than the cars of today, which, in turn, caused me to wonder what the pharmacy informatics world might look like if... and when... it reached the same level of automation we see in today's automobiles. The following thoughts occurred to me (in no particular order)
Drug nomenclature would be globally standardized and available making automated identification of drug products 100% accurate.
Drug products will be packaged for automated delivery. There will be sufficient standardization of this packaging that pharmacy robotics will be designed around that packaging which will facilitate robotic manipulation.
Manual compounding will be completely eliminated; because of machine-friendly packaging and widespread agreement on the computation of things like beyond use dating, robotic devices will receive doses to be prepared, select appropriate source ingredients from inventory, prepare each dose, label it for use, and deliver it to the patient care area while maintaining exquisite and detailed traceability of both sources and process. Quite possibly, those system would include their own analytic processes for guaranteeing both potency (right drug at the right dose/concentration) and, where appropriate, sterility, capturing documentation of both for subsequent review.
The need for compounding will be reduced because the vast quantity and detail of our production data will provide the path to standardization, which will, in turn, drive the most commonly-used compounded doses into the realm of manufacturing.
Automated systems would recognize users by voice and would respond to complex voice commands.