SEPTEMBER,Edition # 34, 2001

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Editor's Note:
When we first introduced Terry we commented that he had been influenced by a group of American writers, who had published a book titled "The Cluetrain Manifesto". The philosophical messages contained in the book are indeed powerful, and well worth following up at the following link:
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

Terry has based some of his assumptions from this text, and he writes:

"A further quotation from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

A managed environment requires behaviour from us that we accept as inevitable although, of course, it is really only mandatory only because it is mandated.
We call it "professionalism."
Professionalism goes far beyond acting according to a canon of ethics……… The Cluetrain Manifesto also talks about markets, places where people gather to exchange goods and ideas, this concept has extended to the shopping centres of today, in many places they have become impersonal, although country towns have less of this than city malls.
This system relies on the customers coming and taking the goods home.
However, the Internet is changing all this, the market now exists in cyber space, there is no need to visit a "place" and collect goods, they can be ordered on the web and delivered to the home.
A number of technologies can come into play in the future for the supply of medical services, some that we know of and some we can only dream about.

A possible scenario, patient walks into doctor's office, facial recognition camera and computer system recognise patient, automatically checks for any entitlements with the appropriate agency, gathers all pertinent information ready for doctor, recent blood and other body fluid analysis, x-rays, scans and other information. When the doctor makes a diagnosis and prescribes medication, the patient can nominate a dispensing machine where medicine will be collected, or will wait until a convenient machine is found; facial recognition system identifies patient, medicine data base is checked, and medicine is dispensed.
As part of the medical consultation process and consequent prescribing, the doctor has deposited appropriate links to web addresses, on the patient's home web page, to inform patient of diagnosed condition together with information on medication prescribed.
There are other variations on this theme that could become possible that will be explored in future editions.
However, in the meantime, as pharmacists interested in our patient's welfare and our own continued gainful pharmacy employment or proprietorship, we should be considering the efficient provision of information to patients.
As five minutes is now considered to be the norm in delivering medicines to the patient, a busy pharmacy has no chance of spending time to adequately counsel patients on their medicines.
A more efficient method would be to have links to appropriate web sites available that can be passed to the patient by way of an e-mail, or alternately the web addresses could be provided using old technology of printing on pieces of paper. The patient could then access these appropriate sites from home, or a friend or relative's computer, or even at a library or Internet café.
These sites could describe the condition diagnosed and offer suggestions of life style changes appropriate to the condition, and give information on the medication prescribed.
The appropriateness of the information could be taking into consideration the normal language used by the patient and their level of comprehension of information. Most important would be the links embedded in the information that could take the viewer to more information.
The ability to link information is one of the greatest features of Internet type documents, and it is a facility that does not exist in material printed on paper. Footnotes or other linking facilities do not allow the multiple linking that can exist on the Internet.
A use of technology that seems to be missing at present is the utilisation of product bar codes to verify the correctness of dispensed medicines.
This may already exist in dispensing software, but this writer has not yet seen it action.
The appropriate algorithm could be that when a prescription is dispensed the label contains a barcode identifying the patient, then each prescription item selected has its bar code scanned against the barcode recorded for the current dispensing. Any discrepancy is immediately obvious.
Such a system would obviate the selection of incorrect products."

Ends

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