OCTOBER, Edition # 35, 2001

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It is encouraging to discover that at least two pharmacy computer systems have the facility to check barcodes on dispensary products against the stored information when confirming the correctness of product selection.
One of them has the activation of this facility as an option, which is a pity, because mandatory use of this procedure would make for fewer selection errors.

Having finished reading the Cluetrain Manifesto it is rewarding to read the following towards the end of the book:
"Here's a question beloved of industry analysts and others who think the point of conversation is to appear smart: How quickly will commerce move to the Web? Let's trot out the charts and studies, confident that at least one of them is going to turn out to be right.
But is this question really so important, or does it just address a detail about timing?
Is your business going to be transformed if it turns out we're not going to hit the gazillion mark until 2004 instead of 2003?
But there is a heartfelt question lurking here. It has to do with the things of the world that quench our thirsts and raise our souls. It has to do with our fear of replacing the shops - and the neighborhoods they enable - with a papersouled efficiency that lets us search out and consume commodity products at disquietingly low prices.
We're afraid that the last shred of human skin left on the bones of commerce is about to come off in our hands.
We want to know how we'll reconnect to the other people in the market: buyers and sellers, people we know or whose faces or whose faces are the landscape of our life in the agora.
And we have this fear precisely because the e-commerce question has been asked wrongly so often, as if once commerce becomes virtual it will become cruelly automatic.
We need to ask the heartfelt question about how we're going to talk about the things we care about, or e-commerce will indeed become nothing but the soundless scrape of coins over the wire".

(Editor's Note: If you have not read the book from which the above was extracted, follow this link for details:
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual )

There is much more to the book, I wonder who else has read it - is reading it, is thinking of reading it?
I believe it is pertinent to the changes we are already observing in pharmacy. Reading the Bulletin dated September 25, in the Health Matters segment, Melissa Sweet has written:
"When Stuart Diver was pulled from the Thredbo landslide, after spending 65 hours buried, he received all the benefits of modern medical technology and know-how. But what he really wanted was for a doctor or nurse to stand by his bed and explain what was happening to him. No doubt many patients will relate to Diver's concerns, which raise important issues for health professions and services. Diver has spoken at several trauma conferences, giving suggestions about how to improve patient's experiences and recovery. This week, he is due to take the platform again, as one of several consumers addressing the 1st Asia Pacific Forum on Quality Improvements on Health Care. It's encouraging that health services are making greater efforts to hear consumers' feedback; it will be far more difficult to ensure this leads to change"

While a patient in hospital has more time available to listen to a doctor or nurse, it is doubtful that there are enough of either professional available, or even qualified to give the information. We have a friend in Canberra, a scientifically qualified person, whose wife is a former Director of Nursing, who is suffering at the hands of the various medical specialists, each of whom is doing what they perceive necessary for him, amputating a limb here, doing a skin graft there, and treating the infection, but no one seems willing or able to tell him what is happening to his whole body. It is for these reasons that I am advocating the supply of information to the suffering, and their carers, on Internet.
Perhaps this could become a collecting house of reliable, useful sites that can be passed onto patients.

Ends

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