From Wearables to Social Media, Embracing Change While Engaging Patients is a Vital Issue in Pharmacy

In a recent article by Chain Drug Review, a panel of industry experts weighed in on the future of pharmacy technology. CDR notes,

“Embracing technological change while engaging patients is an ongoing concern.”

ScriptPro CEO Mike Coughlin gives his views on where pharmacy technology is headed, including the impact of social media, data security, helping healthcare stakeholders connect, and in-store technologies.

“I think integration of community pharmacy technology with health systems technology to provide end-to end patient care is where we need to be going. Unfortunately, there is an unacceptable gap between what the retail world knows about a patient’s medication history and what is available immediately to hospital pharmacy staff when the patient arrives for treatment, which may be urgently required.

Another need is to make special expertise available to support patient adherence and monitoring when complicated medication regimens are involved.

Instead of requiring interfaces to be built between systems (which will require patient permission to exchange data), I think the future is more in the direction of providing the data to a device or secure site that is owned and controlled by the patient so the patient can make his or her own decisions about how it should be shared.

We still see systems in use where sensitive information is not protected. Some legacy systems may not be able to be modified to meet the levels of security that are required. Pharmacy needs to move towards modern platforms that can keep up with the emerging requirements in this area and also in many other areas.”

Read the full Chain Drug Review article here!

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