Ozarks pharmacies use UVC robot to sanitize buildings

Essential businesses across the Ozarks are scrambling to keep their workspace clean.

Don Schreiber of Kirkwood Pharmacy Group turned to robots for help cleaning Midtown Pharmacy off east Division Street and his Boonville Ave. location.

"We want to make sure that the pharmacies themselves are perfectly sterile," he said.

A clinical director for Pic 1 Medical and Vital Hospital Systems said the two robots use UVC light rays to sanitize every inch of the pharmacies.

"It reflects off of mirrors, light, glass, anything that you have in there that has a reflective surface, it is able to bounce those UV rays off of that and disinfect it almost like a laser beam if you were to do it across all different spots of an area," said clinical director Jake Brents.

He said the UVC light rays they use are typically blocked from the Earth by the ozone and have the strength to kill particles as small as the coronavirus.

"With UVC lights we have the ability to kill 99.9% of microorganisms, any types of infectious diseases, viruses, and everything else," Brents said. "It essentially affects the RNA and DNA when it comes to it and essentially disinfects it itself."

The robots do not move around inside of the buildings, but they do communicate with each other on which parts of the room still need to be disinfected.

"It uses infrared signals to determine how far away objects are and once it figures out how far away they are it uses a smart dose technology," Brents said.

Schreiber said his employees are taking extra safety precautions and have limited services to curbside pick up.

"It's just a new normal, you know I think we're going to beat this i'm sure, but you know there will be other microbes or issues that come up but knowing we have this technology just makes us more assured that we can handle it," he said.

Schreiber is using the robots in all 16 of his pharmacies. He said he would like to bring the robots back once every few months.

"It gives us a clean baseline initially and then we will continue to clean the traditional way between UVC cleanings," Schreiber said.

Brents said the UVC robots can clean any type of space in as little as 30 minutes.

"It's a hospital grade cleaning system, but we're able to do this with any type of pharmacies, any type of office buildings, keyboards, mouses, headphones anything like that we have the ability to zap and disinfect those items for you guys," he said.