Prescription volume will grow 10–12% by, creating both challenges and opportunities for health systems. Central fill pharmacy models have emerged as a powerful lever to meet this demand more efficiently, offering scale, consistency, and cost control.
Many operations struggle with hidden bottlenecks that restrict throughput and strain labor resources. This article identifies four of the most common operational bottlenecks in central fill pharmacies and outlines practical, automation-based strategies to eliminate them.
The Challenge: As prescription volume grows, many central fill sites struggle to scale without undertaking costly overhauls that require long downtime windows and increased operational square footage. Fixed infrastructure often limits responsiveness to demand surges or new service lines.
The Solution: Implement Capsa Healthcare’s modular, scalable automation systems built specifically for central fill environments. Unlike retrofitted retail technologies, Capsa’s purpose-built systems allow pharmacy leaders to expand incrementally—adding new dispensing cells without disrupting existing workflows.
Real-World Results
At Harris Health, Capsa is providing a new, modular central fill system that can increase in capacity from 5,000 to 15,000 scripts per shift to meet projected growth without costly downtime or additional space requirements.
The Challenge: Many high-throughput systems rely on dispensing robots to manage core functions. This leads to single points of failure that can grind an entire operation to a halt. For example, a single dispensing robot often fills scripts for multiple SKUs spread across multiple storage cassettes. When one cassette fails, the robot is unable to dispense any of the SKUs it contains. The entire robot is out of commission until the problem can be addressed. Imagine the downstream compounding challenges this causes.
The Solution: Choose Capsa’s automation platforms that feature independent dispensing cells and built-in redundancies. These systems allow for maintenance or fault isolation without stopping the full line, preserving continuity and avoiding costly downtime. Capsa’s high-volume counting cell solutions operate in banks of independent cells. Unlike cassette-based robotic arm systems, if a single cell malfunctions the rest of the bank continues to operate as usual. Maintenance and even cell replacements can happen in real time with no operational disruption.
System Reliability
Capsa Healthcare’s central fill systems are engineered with fault-tolerant architecture—ensuring that no single failure compromises uptime. Capsa’s high-volume counting cells are easy to maintain, replenish, and service without operational disruptions
The Challenge: Systems designed around dispensing robots have a rigid architecture which dictates every other aspect of a central fill operation. The physical design of robotic systems creates hard limits to the ways space can be used, often resulting in hundreds of square feet of wasted space, underutilized zones, and throughput inefficiencies. These limitations cap legacy systems’ capacity at 1–1.5 prescriptions per square foot.
The Solution: Transition to Capsa’s compact, high-density automation that’s optimized for central fill workflows. High-volume counting cells allow for nearly limitless flexibility. Each system is designed to the operational needs and available space of your facility. Capsa’s systems can be configured in three dimensions to take advantage of not only floor space, but also vertical space. That’s how Capsa delivers an astounding throughput of 3.5 scripts per square foot.
Space Optimization
Space optimization requires a 360 view of your central fill operation. While equipment footprint is an important consideration, a thorough evaluation of your existing system can reveal multiple opportunities for efficiency gains. In addition to equipment size and throughput capability, an effective analysis also examines the low of people, inventory, and packaging across the existing floorplan. Capsa’s design team helps reconfigure operations to do more with less—enabling you to scale without expanding your facility footprint or labor needs.
The Challenge: Manual processes in replenishment, labeling, packaging, and unit-of- use dispensing create bottlenecks, increase labor costs, and heighten the risk of error. With the ongoing pharmacy staffing shortage, this is an unsustainable model.
The Solution: Deploy Capsa’s automation strategically across the dispensing lifecycle:
Workforce Optimization
Capsa’s automation not only significantly accelerates processing
speed, but it also allows pharmacies to reallocate scarce labor to more
clinically valuable tasks—improving ROI and workforce sustainability
in today’s challenging labor market.
Central fill pharmacies are foundational to scalable, cost-efficient medication distribution. But bottlenecks—whether technical, spatial, or workforce-related—can hold back even the best efficiency strategies.
Capsa Healthcare’s purpose-built automation offers clear solutions: module scalability, fault-tolerant design, space efficiency, and dramatic labor optimization.
When implemented, these technologies unlock new levels of performance—preparing your operation for sustained growth.
Capsa’s automation specialists can provide a personalized assessment of your central fill workflow. Capsa Healthcare partners with health systems and retail pharmacy operators nationwide to deliver tailored automation solutions designed for today’s demands—and tomorrow’s opportunities.
