Digital health platform MedPal AI has opened a robotic distribution centre that it said has the capacity to fulfill more than 300,000 prescription items a month.
The company announced last week that its “largest” robotic dispensing facility to date, located at Sarus Court in Runcorn, is “being commissioned in phases” and will start processing more than 2,000 prescription items per day from this month.
This figure is expected to grow to 10,000 per day once the centre is “fully completed and operational”, it said.
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MedPal AI also cited figures from PharmData showing that in February, Well.co.uk dispensed 142,011 items and Boots dispensed 87,992 items.
It said that based on this data, the planned capacity of its new site would be “more than twice” Well.co.uk’s monthly item level and “more than three times” Boots’.
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The company said the facility has benefitted from over £1m investment and is positioned to become “one of the most sophisticated and lowest-cost pharmacy dispensing platforms in the UK at scale”.
It has NHS approval and will cover around 23,000 square feet “when fully completed”, it added.
“Next phase of growth”
MedPal AI chief executive Jason Drummond said the new facility “gives MedPal AI the scale, automation and resilience required to support the next phase of our growth across NHS dispensing, private prescriptions, AI-enabled patient engagement and direct-to-patient pharmacy fulfilment”.
He added that the “size and capacity” of the facility places the company “firmly among the most ambitious technology-led pharmacy operators in the UK”.
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It comes after MedPal AI announced that it had dispensed a record 41,600 prescription items from its distribution centre in March this year.
And it follows the company tripling its facility footprint in February as part of its now-completed acquisition of Universal Pharmacy’s assets.
