Package making – With means responsive to a sensed condition – Of individual contents or group feed or delivery
Reexamination Certificate
1999-06-29
2001-11-20
Vo, Peter (Department: 3721)
Package making
With means responsive to a sensed condition
Of individual contents or group feed or delivery
C053S492000, C053S055000, C053S509000, C053S237000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06318051
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention pertains to a process and a device for automatically commissioning singular individually packaged products, especially a single pill, from a supply station with a plurality of containers.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In hospitals, drug doses are sorted in individual departments by the health care personnel for patients of that department in trays with recesses according to the time of day at which they are to be taken; morning, noon, evening or night. The health care personnel has to spend about 2 hours per day and department doing this, and it also requires a drug storage facility in each department, at least for a limited amount and variety of drugs, which leads to expensive stocking and the risk of expiration of the expiration date. Since stocking must be taken into account in each department, a correspondingly large inventory of drugs must also be kept in the hospital pharmacy or the supply pharmacy of the hospital. Packages for the department stockrooms are commissioned for the individual departments once or even twice a day.
An automatic commissioning device for drugs (U.S. company of BAXTER), which has individual plastic containers for drugs, has been known. The containers contain one type of drug as an open, i.e., unpackaged bulk product, which must be confirmed in writing by at least two pharmacists. Each container has a wheel-shaped dispensing device with an electric motor-driven ejector, which is set by the manufacturer to the product to be commissioned and is put into operation when the individually packaged products are commissioned and delivers a single pill into the feed hopper, through which the pill will then slide into a plastic bag assigned to the patient.
The drawback is the expensive checking, the complicated setting of the device, as well as the complicated design, so that only relatively few types of drugs and only frequently requested drugs can be stored and commissioned automatically. The use of such an automatic unit is limited to 900 to 1,500 specialties in an assortment used in hospitals.
It should also be taken into account and is disadvantageous that only open, unpackaged individually packaged products can be commissioned, i.e., open pills, capsules, tablets, which are filled or strewn into the corresponding compartments of the automatic unit. Thus, only about 200 unpackaged drug types are available in a hospital. The prepackaged drug types are unsuitable for the automatic hygienic commissioning process from the very beginning and must be “commissioned” by the health care personnel by hand.
Open unpackaged pills, etc., are also subject to a certain wear or mutual abrasion during commissioning. As a result, the single dose to be administered cannot be exactly ascertained for a patient. Moreover, since only one feed hopper is provided for all plastic bags, cross contamination may sometimes happen, namely, when rests of one drug come into contact with another drug commissioned later in the feed hopper. Finally, the commissioned plastic bags must be further handled, labeled and distributed manually. The risk of mixup of the commissioned pills up to the patient is not ruled out.
SUMMARY AND OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION
Based on the above-described state of the art, the object of the present invention is to provide a commissioning process and a commissioning device of the type described in the introduction, which process and device make it possible with simple means to reliably and automatically commission even packaged, singular individually packaged products.
The basic object of the present invention is accomplished by a process of the type described in claim
1
. The process according to the present invention is advantageously improved by the features of claims
2
through
15
.
An automatic commissioning device operated according to the above-mentioned process is characterized by the features of claim
16
. The automatic commissioning device is advantageously improved by the features of claims
17
through
35
.
The essence of the process according to the present invention for the automatic commissioning of singular individually packaged products, especially a single pill, from a supply station with a plurality of containers is that preselected, flat, individually packaged product packs of the same type, so-called “blister packs,” are stacked in assigned containers in the form of essentially vertical storage shafts; that a blister pack of singular individually packaged products to be commissioned is displaced into a lateral dispensing position located outside the stack; that a receiving tray is positioned under the individually packaged products, which are to be commissioned and are in the dispensing position; that a dispensing unit assigned to the storage shafts with a dispensing finger is positioned above the individually packaged products, which are to be commissioned and are in the dispensing position, and the dispensing finger is moved downward toward an abutment to separate the singular individually packaged products from the rest of the blister pack and the separated individually packaged products are received in a predetermined recess of the receiving tray.
Despite automation, the blister packs are preferably placed or stacked manually into the assigned storage shafts, because the blister packs are normally prepackaged and presorted by the manufacturer in large institutional packs. The original box containing the blister packs is then scanned and a code is permanently assigned to it at the assigned storage shaft. The storage shaft can now be opened. The agreement of the code is compared each time product is introduced.
At the same time, an assigned article number and an assigned blister arrangement (location of the drugs) are written in a transponder of the storage shaft by means of a writing-reading unit located at the dispensing unit.
For commissioning, the lowermost blister pack of individually packaged products to be commissioned is preferably displaced by a displacing unit into the dispensing position.
A coded receiving tray, especially a patient tray, is fed to the dispensing unit, and a commission given on the consumer or patient code is transmitted to an electronic control device, especially as aisle master computer. The data contain both the name of the article and the quantity as well as the time at which the pill is to be taken.
The electronic control device has both a control function for the individual assembly units and checking functions for the correct selection or commissioning of all desired singular individually packaged products in a receiving tray.
The dispensing unit is moved by means of the electronic control device into a (first) dispensing position of the storage shaft reached, and the transporter is read. It ascertains that the correct storage shaft has been reached and contains the position within the blister at which the next dispensing will take place.
Then (or already before), the receiving or patient tray is positioned under the above-mentioned dispensing position, i.e., under the individually packaged products to be commissioned in the dispensing position.
An abutment in the form of an iris is moved to the dispensing position under the blister and is set to the size of the individually packaged products.
A pushing plunger, whose size and shape are adjustable, or a cutting knife is positioned above the individually packaged products to be commissioned, and the individually packaged products are pushed or cut off into the recess of the receiving tray without direct contact.
Should individually packaged products, especially a drug, from another plane be needed, the receiving tray is transferred by means of an elevator into the desired other storage shaft plane in the case of storage shafts which are arranged one on top of another and are to be commissioned one after the other. This process can be minimized by storing drugs typical of the given department in the same storage shaft plane.
The receiving tray supplied with commissioned individually packaged products is moved b
McGlew and Tuttle , P.C.
P+P Materialfluss-Systeme GmbH
Paradiso John
Vo Peter
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