Capsa Healthcare Brand Guidelines: Medication Carts, Kirby Lester Counters & a 1958 Root

Three businesses, one name.

Capsa Healthcare makes medication carts, computer workstations on wheels, pill counters and pharmacy robots. The company was founded in 1958, Private Equity Wire reported in August 2020, and today it speaks of more than six decades in healthcare. Its present form is the result of combination: HIT Consultant reported in September 2017 that Capsa Healthcare was “formed through the integration” of three businesses, Capsa Solutions, Rubbermaid Healthcare and Kirby Lester.

Capsa Solutions was the base. In 2014 it was headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with a management, manufacturing and distribution site in Columbus, Ohio, according to a transaction note from the adviser Duff & Phelps, published by Kroll, and it sold medication carts, medical carts, computer carts, monitor arms and processing equipment. It was then owned by the private equity firm Keystone Capital. On 1 July 2014 Capsa Solutions bought Kirby Lester Holdings of Lake Forest, Illinois, a maker of automatic tablet counters and robotic dispensing systems sold to pharmacies in the United States and abroad which, the note says, had been in pharmacy automation for more than four decades.

In September 2017 the Los Angeles private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, or LLCP, acquired Capsa Healthcare, HIT Consultant reported; financial terms were not disclosed. At the time the company was headquartered in Portland, with further production in Columbus and in Agua Prieta, Mexico, and it served more than 3,000 customers, among them health systems, senior care communities and retail and institutional pharmacies. The same report grouped its range into three lines: point-of-care workstations, medication-management products and pharmacy automation systems. Private Equity Wire still described Capsa as an LLCP portfolio company in August 2020.

Counters, carts and central fill.

The Kirby Lester counters sit at the dispensing counter of a pharmacy. The current model, the KL1v, is described by Capsa as the next generation of the Kirby Lester KL1: a compact stand-alone unit that counts tablets and capsules poured through a tray, plugs into a wall socket and needs no connection to the pharmacy’s computer system. Capsa dates Kirby Lester pill counters in North American pharmacies back 55 years.

On hospital and care-home floors, the company sells medication carts in several families. Its website lists the Avalo, M-Series and Vintage Encore lines, each offered in versions for punch cards, multi-dose packs or automated pouch packaging, alongside computing workstations such as the Trio and wall cabinets. In 2014 the Duff & Phelps note already described carts, computer carts and monitor arms as the core of the Capsa Solutions range.

At the other end of the scale is central fill, where prescriptions for many pharmacies are dispensed in one building. In August 2020 Capsa bought RoboPharma, the trading name of NewRobo Development BV of Waalwijk in the Netherlands, which Private Equity Wire said created and installed pharmacy automation for some of the largest pharmacies in Europe. Capsa’s website now lists RoboPharma among its brands and its Waalwijk site among its locations, and presents a High-Volume Counting Cell for central-fill and mail-order pharmacies, built in modular banks of 20 cells, together with its Axona pharmacy software.

How the category presents itself.

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.

Seven brand names under one parent.

Capsa now presents itself as a family of brands. Its website names seven: Capsa Solutions, Rubbermaid Healthcare, Kirby Lester, RoboPharma, Humanscale Healthcare, Tryten and MASS Medical Storage. It has kept buying. In July 2025 it announced the purchase of BlueBin, a Kanban-based hospital supply system with predictive analytics, and in June 2026 that of The Harloff Company, which Capsa says was founded in 1951 and entered healthcare in 1987 with storage and transport products, and today makes storage cabinets, procedure carts and medication storage for hospitals, clinics, ambulatory surgery centres and long-term care facilities. Capsa said BlueBin’s systems were in use in more than 250 hospitals and that its existing leadership would stay in place.

The centre of the business has moved east. The company’s locations page now says it is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and its 2026 press releases are datelined Canal Winchester, Ohio; Portland keeps a production plant and an engineering office, and RoboPharma remains in Waalwijk. The company says its Portland, Canal Winchester and Agua Prieta plants are certified to ISO 9001:2015 for the design, manufacture and service of mobile workstations, medication carts and processing systems, and that it holds ISO 27001:2022 certification for information security. In May 2026 it named Jeff Schlossnagle, who had joined Capsa in 2023 after 19 years at Omnicell, as chief executive, succeeding Gaurav Agarwal; Capsa said his remit covered clinical workflow, supply chain management and central-fill pharmacy automation, and that its central-fill systems had spread to health systems, grocery and pharmacy chains and mail-order pharmacies.

For a design guide, Capsa Healthcare shows how a company assembled from several older names can present carts, counters and robots under one parent while keeping its product brands visible. Compare Omnicell and ScriptPro. For this guide we use a cart navy, ink, a pale blue and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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