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All pharmacies needed their own web pages or they would miss out on business opportunities, Professor Bill Felkey (associate professor, department of pharmacy care systems, Auburn university, Alabama, United States) told the AAH/Vantage convention during a presentation on incorporating the internet into everyday practice.
|  Bill Felkey: 'a tremendous opportunity' |
Every pharmacy needed its own web page to which people could be directed to find out what the pharmacy had to offer. The cost of registering one's own domain name was not high, and having one's own website was a tremendous opportunity. Professor Felkey drew attention to the Cyber Dialogue website (cyberdialogue.com), which offered products and services to help one take advantage of the business opportunities provided by the internet.
Along with content and communication, commerce was one of the "three c's" offered by the internet. So far as content was concerned, the internet was a source of more information than the entire history of print. However, care was needed in ensuring that the information one accessed was dependable, since anyone at all could publish to the internet.
Among many valuable internet information sources was Gold Standard Multimedia (www.gsm.com), whose features included a free database of clinical pharmacology information. Dynamic Medical Information Service (www.dynamicmedical.com) offered free medical information on more than 2,000 disease. A huge amount of information was also available from the United States government's National Institutes of Health (www.nih.gov). For example, one could access a free catalogue of over 18,000 articles on complementary medicine (nccam.nih.gov).
Turning to communication, Professor Felkey said that an illustration of the power of the website as a communication medium was the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (www.retroconference.org). While the "live" 1999 conference had been attended by 2,100 people, the website's virtual conference had attracted no fewer than 1.8m people in 100 countries over the following 10 months.
Discussing hardware that helped in computer communication, Professor Felkey referred to the existence of hand-held, radio frequency-linked devices that had many applications. There were now many portable diagnostic and monitoring devices that could be used in the patient's home with the results downloaded to the pharmacy computer. They included devices for blood pressure measurement, blood glucose measurement, asthma monitoring, cholesterol testing and bone density measurement.
There were also compliance devices that would remotely provide the pharmacy with information about a patient's medication usage. The Medi-Monitor was a device that sounded an alarm to tell the patient when it was time to take a medicine and which medicine to take. It could help patients such as those with Alzheimer's disease who would otherwise need a carer on hand. The device asked questions to assess health status and quality of life and at night could download information to the pharmacy to help in the management of the patient's medication.
Professor Felkey said that further information on pharmacy and the internet was available from his department's website (pharmacy.auburn.edu/pcs).