Patent ID: 8271128

Claim:
A prescription fulfillment system which counts manually-poured tablets and tablets fed from a cassette, comprising: a housing; an upright chute mounted with respect to the housing through which objects fall into the housing; a first automatic tablet counter within the housing which receives tablets from the chute and counts plural tablets simultaneously moving past a sensor; a cassette dispenser integrated with the system having a cassette mount which positions a cassette mounted thereon to feed tablets to the chute and first automatic tablet counter; a cassette dispenser drive system which powers a mounted cassette to feed tablets therefrom; a second automatic object tablet counter which counts single tablets moving past a sensor fed from a mounted cassette; and a data processing platform within the housing operatively connected to the first and second automatic tablet counters and the cassette dispenser drive system, the data processing platform being operative to: receive and store data for a plurality of prescriptions; retrieve data for fulfillment of a user-selected stored prescription, the data including a required tablet type and a required quantity: verify that a user-selected container or cassette contains the required type of tablet, if the required tablets are in the cassette, activate the cassette dispenser drive system to feed the required tablets from the mounted cassette to the first and second automatic tablet counters, deactivate the cassette dispenser drive system once the count of the second automatic tablet counter equals the required quantity; maintain the count of the first automatic tablet counter for the tablets poured from the user-selected container or fed from the cassette past said first automatic tablet counter; and indicate the count of the first automatic tablet counter.