June 30, 2026 | Source: Forbes | by Dr. Sai Balasubramanian, M.D., J.D.
The concept of autonomous pharmacies is becoming more popular. This week, startup Queue emerged from stealth, with a goal to create autonomous robotic driven pharmacies. Queue operates by taking sealed pill bottles in one end and produces filled prescription vials in the other. The company claims that it can “deliver medications at up to 96% lower cost than traditional pharmacy operations and can be deployed across retail locations, hospitals, rural communities and other care settings where pharmacy access is constrained.”
As one of Queue’s lead investors explains, “pharmacy has an infrastructure problem. While the industry has been forced to work around labor shortages, store closures and broken unit economics, [Queue] has taken a fundamentally different approach: automating the physical fulfillment layer itself…It has exceptional founders solving a massive, urgent problem with technology that can deliver outsized impact.”
Driving more confidence into the idea, Amazon Pharmacy announced a similar initiative last year with its automated kiosk concept at One Medical locations. The company explained that kiosks would have available the most commonly required prescriptions such as antibiotics, blood pressure medications and inhalers. As Hannah McClellan, vice president of operations at Amazon Pharmacy explained, “It’s an incredibly satisfactory experience. Taking our Amazon playbook, we see a way to improve on all those things [that are currently cumbersome with the pharmacy fulfillment process]. What we’re doing is starting from the customer and working backwards.”
