Because you can't hold a machine accountable, and if a pharmacist has to review the prescription anyway, the cost savings for just the dispensing part wouldn't be there considering the machines wouldn't be cheap.
I needed an emergency prescription the other night and arrived at the pharmacy three minutes before closing time. The pharmacist was able to verify my prescription, dispense the pills, check their work, and complete my transaction with a minute to spare. It would take a very long time to pay off a machine that handled just the dispensing part.
Machines cost a ton of money and need to be maintained?
As those two variables change, I'm sure they will replace the dispensing function for pharmacists. In fact this already does happen at a lot of pharmacies these days. Machines put the pills in bottles, then a pharmacist hands the bottle to you.
A pharmacy tech actually counts the pills if they move them from Bottle A to Bottle B, it is not particularly time consuming, and it isn't a particularly skilled position. Starts at $14 an hour around me and tops out around $23.
They are in large setups. Including mail order and bulk dispensing places (like Walmart pharmacy—most pills are dispensed at central locations and delivered to the store prepackaged).
I could imagine a machine like this would cost something on the order of $100k, require ongoing maintenance and wouldn't really solve any problems/bottlenecks at your typical local pharmacy.
It's not like you could replace the pharmacist with a machine.
I get that a pharmacist should review the prescription. And let’s say you even want employee-customer interaction; which is great.
But dispensing X pills from one bottle to another bottle is a solved problem right?