An outline of progress in electronic pharmacy was given to the conference by senior figures from three pharmacy internet businesses.
Mr DANIEL LEE (Pharmacy2u) said that there was little he could add to what had been said in a Journal article about his business last week (p576). More than 1,000 people a day were registering with www.pharmacy2u.co.uk, and it already had more customers than one would see in 30 years of community pharmacy practice.
Pharmacy2u had a team of dedicated pharmacists available for private consultation and they had been inundated with requests for advice. The fact that Regaine was the company's biggest selling product suggested that for certain types of product consumers were too embarrassed to go into a pharmacy for the face-to-face contact that was claimed to be an important aspect of traditional pharmacy but in practice was not always available.
Mr Lee added that pharmacy2u customers tended to be from the ABC1 socio-economic groups. They had internet access at work and actively sought health care advice and products. Sixty per cent of customers bought pharmacy medicines.
Mr ERIC HUNTER (commercial director, Unipharma) said that www.unipharma.net (PJ, March 11, p399) was believed to be the world's first pharmacy business-to-business (B2) website. It offered an independent site which currently hosted six wholesalers' catalogues and gave independent pharmacists the opportunity to search by supplier or product before placing orders. Security was such that a wholesaler could view only its own prices and a pharmacist could access only the prices offered specifically to him or her.
The wholesalers paid charges that were competitive with other marketing methods but they benefited from a bigger customer base and could let their representatives concentrate on gaining new business rather than servicing existing customers. The service was free to pharmacists. Since it had gone national in March, the response from pharmacists had been "staggering".
Mr MUSA DHALLA (Pharmalife Ltd) said that his business (PJ, February 19, p287) was to offer two B2B portals: www.pharmalife.co.uk would provide electronic services while www.tradepharm.co.uk would give an opportunity to increase the profit of one's business.
Pharmalife would work with existing providers to offer services such as structured information, appropriate application of technology, structured news, training programmes, on-line recruitment, and events and diary management. Tradepharm would be an on-line market place. It would be in competition with Unipharma, but he expected that pharmacists would register with all such sites. The competition would be in the service provided.
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