Meet Rosie, the robot helping a west Michigan pharmacy after Rite Aid closures

• Rite Aid closed all of its Michigan stores last year; Walgreens and CVS closed dozens of stores
• The closures left many towns with no pharmacy and sent many Michiganders flocking to independent pharmacies
• To handle the influx of new customers, one pharmacy invested big money in robots to help fill prescriptions faster

She costs as much as a house, is nearly as big as a wall, and the pharmacy staff at west Michigan’s Cassopolis Family Clinic don’t know what they’d do without Rosie the robot.

Installed last month, the machine that automatically fills prescription bottles has helped the clinic’s pharmacy staff keep up with an influx of new patients after Rite Aid pulled out of Michigan last year. 

While such machines are rare outside of chain pharmacies, “for us, it was a no-brainer to get one of these, just because of the huge increase in business,” said Kevin Klipowicz, pharmacy director at the clinic that now includes Cassopolis’s only pharmacy.

Amid lower drug reimbursement rates, rising competition from online pharmacies, and a rise in mail-order prescriptions often required by insurance companies, big-name chain drug stores have contracted in recent years.  

Rite Aid closed all hundreds of Michigan stores last year and hundreds more around the country. Walgreens plans to close 1,200 stores around the country over the next few years. CVS closed hundreds of stores, too.

The contraction has left many towns with no pharmacy. As of last year, about half of Michigan’s 83 counties were considered “pharmacy deserts,” meaning residents typically have to drive at least 15 minutes to reach a pharmacy, according to discount prescription company GoodRx. Across the US, 45 million people live in pharmacy deserts.

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Many independent pharmacies picked up significant additional business after the chain drug stores left town, said John Gross, executive director of the Michigan Independent Pharmacy Association. Especially in markets where the chain was the only competition, smaller druggists have hired additional staff to handle the surge.

“We’ve definitely seen in some of those locations a huge increase in business,” Gross said. “We have had to add staff and make adjustments to handle all of that.”

Few independent pharmacies — which face many of the same pressures that forced the closure of so many chain pharmacies — can afford a machine like Rosie, which can cost between $100,000 and $200,000, Gross said.

But it made sense in Cassopolis.

Since the local Rite Aid closed, the Cassopolis Family Clinic and its other location in Niles — which has had its own Rosie since August — has seen a 55% uptick in prescriptions, Klipowicz said. 

“It’s crazy,” he said. “In some of these towns, (Rite Aid stores) were the only game in town, and they just pulled all out of the state. It left a lot of people in a hard place.”

Rosie has not replaced staff. In fact, since Rite Aid closed, Klipowicz’s clinic has added four pharmacy technicians and two pharmacists, with a third new pharmacist to begin soon. The clinic plans to add a third location in Dowagiac.

“The need is just so great right now,” Klipowicz said.

The pharmacies struggled to keep up, even with the new staff.

Enter Rosie.

The robot — nicknamed by the clinic’s CEO, a big fan of “The Jetsons” — handles the pharmacy’s 200 most-filled prescriptions, Klipowicz said, filling, labeling, and capping the bottles of pills.

The machine works like an automatic vending machine. The machine is filled with pills, empty bottles and caps. When a new order comes in, Rosie finds the appropriate pills, dumps them into a bottle, prints and affixes the label, and puts a cap on it.

The robot stands about 6 feet tall by 6 feet wide and weighs nearly 2,400 pounds. 

Staff still check prescriptions both before and after Rosie fills them to make sure customers get the right medications and that those medications won’t have negative interactions with any other drugs, Klipowicz said.

Klipowicz couldn’t say precisely how fast the machine works, but said it is significantly faster than a human and frees pharmacists and technicians to focus on other tasks, such as working with customers.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “Such a time-saver. It’s a game-changer.”