Parata Brand Guidelines: The 2001 Durham Pharmacy-Robot Maker Now Part of BD

A dispensing-robot maker in the Research Triangle.

Parata is a pharmacy automation company from Durham, North Carolina, and since July 2022 it has been part of BD, the New Jersey medical technology company formally named Becton, Dickinson and Company. Its machines fill and label prescription vials and package medicines for pharmacies.

The company, long known as Parata Systems, entered the automated dispensing market in 2001, Pharmacy Times reported in a July 2009 profile, and in less than a decade had grown to more than 500 employees with a nationwide roster of large and small pharmacy clients. The magazine described its Durham headquarters as a one-storey office-park building whose rooms doubled as laboratories: one walled off with egg-crate panels to measure the noise of the dispensing machines, others for testing bottle-capping and the wheels, belts and microchips inside each machine, and a metrology lab for checking incoming parts against their designs.

Its early dispensing systems were the RDS, the Max and the Mini, which the 2009 profile named as its products. The RDS became the first piece of pharmacy automation equipment to receive the GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certification, granted by the GREENGUARD Environmental Institute in late May 2009, according to the same article; the institute tested the air around the machine at a rate of 1,000 prescriptions a day.

The same profile gave a picture of the business at the end of its first decade. Testing stations ran constantly, putting machines through thousands of movements a minute to see how they would stand up to daily use in pharmacies, and much of the maintenance and repair work was handled by travelling Parata representatives at the pharmacies themselves. Tom Rhoads, then Parata’s executive vice president of customer and market strategies, told the magazine the company had more than 2,000 machines in the field. One customer quoted in the article, a pharmacist in Fortuna, California, had first used a McKesson machine and upgraded when Parata took over that business.

McKesson, TCGRx and Frazier.

Parata grew through two deals before BD’s. In 2006 it acquired the assets of the Automated Prescription Systems business unit of McKesson, the American drug distributor, and entered a long-term alliance under which McKesson became the sole third-party distributor of Parata products in North America and a significant minority investor in the company, Pharmacy Times reported in 2009. Drug Topics reported in August 2006 that Parata would bring 75 manufacturing, engineering and customer support jobs to its Durham headquarters from Louisiana as it integrated the McKesson products it had bought that spring.

The second deal came in December 2018. TCGRx, a maker of medication adherence packaging and a portfolio company of the private equity firm Frazier Healthcare Partners, acquired Parata, Robotics and Automation News reported on 3 December 2018. The combined company kept the Parata Systems name, with its headquarters in Durham and additional facilities in southern Wisconsin. TCGRx’s chief executive, Rob Kill, became chief executive of the combined business, and TCGRx’s founder, Duane Chudy, became vice chairman. The report said the two companies together had more than 4,500 adherence packagers, inspection systems and vial-filling robots installed in retail, long-term care, hospital, government and mail-order pharmacies in North America.

The merger widened the product family. Parata’s high-speed vial-filling robots were joined by TCGRx’s medication adherence packaging, and the combined company said it would expand into central fill, inventory control and automated blister-card packaging.

By 2022, Parata’s systems covered vial filling, packaging and central fill, MedTech Dive reported on 7 June 2022, with 6,000 systems installed across 4,000 pharmacies in the United States, in retail pharmacies, long-term care facilities and health systems.

Pharmacy automation.

Pharmacy automation is a business of quiet machines in busy rooms, and the companies that make them tend to present themselves through the places their equipment stands. The most familiar image is the automated dispensing cabinet: a tall, mostly white unit of locked drawers and a touchscreen, photographed on a hospital ward or beside a nurses’ station, often with a clinician mid-task rather than posed for the camera.

Behind the counter the imagery changes. Central-pharmacy and retail robots are usually shown as robotic arms behind glass, picking boxes from dense shelving or filling vials in long rows, while pouch packagers are pictured in close-up: a strip of clear pouches, each printed with a name and a time, unspooling from the machine. IV compounding robots appear inside clean enclosures, with syringes and vials arranged with laboratory precision.

People appear at the edges of these pictures. The standard scene is a pharmacist or technician at a touchscreen, scanning a barcode or checking a screen of data, and the wording around it leans on workflow, inventory and time returned to patient care. Colour palettes in the category are usually restrained, with whites, light greys and a single corporate blue, green or teal, and typography tends toward a plain sans that reads well on screens and spec sheets.

Much of the category’s presentation happens in person. Makers show their cabinets, carts and robots on stands at trade events such as the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in the United States, the NACDS events for American chain pharmacy and Expopharm in Germany, where visitors can watch the machines run. The guides that follow look at how individual companies in this field set out their names, colours and type.

A brand inside BD.

BD announced its agreement to buy Parata from Frazier Healthcare Partners on 6 June 2022, and on 18 July 2022 it said the acquisition was complete. In its announcement of the closing, BD said the Parata portfolio would become part of its Medication Management Solutions business, within the BD Medical segment, and described Parata as serving retail, hospital and long-term care pharmacies. Analysts at J.P. Morgan wrote that Parata’s systems would pair with BD’s Pyxis line of automated medication dispensers, MedTech Dive reported.

Parata is therefore no longer an independent company: since July 2022 it has belonged to BD. MedTech Dive called the deal BD’s second acquisition of 2022 and reported that it was bought for cash; BD said the combined company was positioned to offer a comprehensive set of technologies to the pharmacy automation market segment.

BD also set out the trends it expected the Parata team to help pharmacy leaders address: clinician shortages, wage inflation, the centralisation of pharmacy services and growing clinical demands on pharmacy staff. Those themes echo the reasons pharmacists gave Pharmacy Times for automating more than a decade earlier.

The name itself can mislead in search: “parata” is an ordinary Italian word, meaning a parade or, in football, a save, and it has no connection with the North Carolina company.

For a design guide, Parata shows how an engineering brand can keep its name through three owners — independent, private equity and a large medical technology group. Compare BD, its owner since 2022, and ScriptPro, which also makes robots for retail pharmacies. For this guide we use a teal and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Parata’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.