The Clockwork Druggist

[beamjockey]

Last night I accompanied someone to a local clinic, an outpost of Central Dupage Hospital, and found a new piece of technology in the waiting room.


It's a vending machine that dispenses prescription drugs. Welcome to the future.

Someone tell autopope about this: yet another sign that getting out of the pharmacy business was a good career move. Had he continued, autopope might have been out on the street by now, to be replaced by autochemist...

Perhaps the corner druggist will go the way of the soda jerk he once employed* --I hope not. I like my local pharmacist, and as I gradually mature into the decades when I become ever more lucrative to him, I find it comforting to be able to consult a human regarding the growing number of pills I must consume.



* Of whom, I hope to write more soon.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Depending on what it does, it could provide an end run around the campaign to obstruct oral contraceptive distribution through "pharmacists' rights".

[erik]

(my first job was in fact that of Soda Jerk at Corner Pharmacy)

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

A little retouching and it could be TastyMeds....

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is going to render pharmacists obsolete. Period.

Firstly, the range of prescribable pharmaceuticals is so enormous that this thing either only carries a limited range of commmon repeat items, or the wall behind it conceals a small warehouse.

Secondly, about 80% of the pharmacist's job these days is clinical work involving spotting drug interactions, optimizing a patient's medication regime, and so on. Not easily subject to automation.

What I think this machine is, is a cunning tool for handling patients who can't make it to a pharmacy during opening hours. There's probably a pharmacy in the same building where human beings are preparing packages for individual named patients on the basis of prescriptions emailed in from their practitioners, and a couple of times a day a janitor wheels a cartridge full of these pre-packs down to the machine. The patients are then free to turn up at any time of day or night to collect their meds. Provide ID, pay, and collect canned package from the hopper. Sort of like a bank's night safe in reverse.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I don't think this is going to render pharmacists obsolete. Period.

Oh, I wouldn't contend this seriously-- as you suggest, ATMs have not eliminated bankers nor even bank tellers-- but I hope I may be forgiven a tongue-in-cheek initial reaction.

I note that the machine incorporates a telephone handset that's a hotline to a real phamacist (possibly one situated von Kempelen-style).

[(Anonymous)]

If you look at InstyMeds's web page, your last paragraph seems to describe it pretty well. (I notice that the medicine is dispensed in a standard pharmacy container with a standard pharmacy label, which I think would be difficult if it were being done on the fly.)

--Evelyn

[qnofhrt.livejournal.com]

Secondly, about 80% of the pharmacist's job these days is clinical work involving spotting drug interactions, optimizing a patient's medication regime, and so on.

Really? In what type of practice setting and what country? I work in both a college of pharmacy and a retail pharmacy and the role of the pharmacist in retail (in the US)isn't really anything like that. Drug interactions are found by the software and evaluated by the pharmacist for seriousness and they may also on occasion suggest different medications for a patient. Although there has been a push towards MTM (Medication therapy management) at a retail level, until 1)more insurance companies pay for it and 2)retail pharmacy management will staff more pharmacists, MTM isn't going to be a big part of a pharmacist's job. Since retail (both chain and independent) pharmacy accounts for the bulk of jobs in pharmacy, followed by in-patient hospital staff pharmacists (who also don't do a lot of these types of activities), I don't think this statement is true (at least not in the US). The only pharmacists that it does apply to are the clinical specialists. While the %age of pharmacists who are clinical specialists is growing, it's still dwarfed by the number of pharmacists at the retail level.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

In hospital practice in the UK, although admittedly I'm way out of date (as I quit practice two decades ago).

[qnofhrt.livejournal.com]

Huh. Have heard of these machines, have not known they were in Illinois.

I also don't think this will replace the pharmacist - somebody has to prepare the packaged meds. However, this and it's cousin the drive-thru pharmacy are a bad idea. As you pointed out, as the number of prescription medications people take increases, pharmacists are important sources of information. Every shift in the pharmacy reinforces to me that the general public knows very little about the medications they buy, both prescription and OTC. Or what they think they know is wrong.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

The general public have very little idea of how their own bodies work, period. (This goes as much here in the UK as in the USA.)

This has lethal consequences.

Two statistics stick in my head. The survival rate among males suffering a first myocardial infarction is around 52%. However, the survival rate among those who reach a hospital within three hours of symptoms commencing is around 90%. This is in the UK, an overwhelmingly urban society (about 70% are city-dwellers; another 20-25% live in towns or other settlements rather than in the countryside) with free healthcare.

Obviously we can't ask them (they're dead), but why on earth would anyone experiencing the symptoms of a potentially-fatal heart attack not seek medical assistance immediately?

The answer is fairly clear: they didn't know what was happening to them. As in, they had no idea.

And that's before we get into the subtle stuff like bleeding moles, changes in defecation patterns, and so on ...

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

One of my in-law uncles was a pharmacist. He would occasionally tell stories of physicians' mistakes caught by pharmacists.

There are still a few soda counters around. I'm not even counting places like Baskin Robbins, here, which I don't consider actual soda counters. I'm talking about places where you can sit on a stool at a counter and order a sundae, a milkshake, etc (Even a custom soda!) and enjoy that while watching the soda jerks at works. (Uhm, work...)

You do know that the term soda jerk comes from the fact that early soda dispensers required the handle to be jerked back and forth, right?

There's a whole vocabulary of slang involved with soda counters. I looked some of this up a few years back as research for a novel set in the Thirties. "Make it cackle" means put a raw egg in a milkshake.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

The machine's design reminds me of the old "Star Trek". Not sure if that's a good thing.

[isherempress.livejournal.com]

There is a soda fountain in the back of the drugstore in "downtown" Saugatuck. Quite nice. We drank phosphates there last summer, which seemed quite appropriate for any Con.

Saugatuck Drugstore Soda Fountain
201 Butler Street
Saugatuck, MI 49453
269-857-2300

I have been doing my best to keep my prescriptions at the local Walgreens because that way I see the same people regularly. Getting Rx scrips in the mail (as the insurance company wants) doesn't appeal to me at all.

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

When do they start distributing soma?

re:

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, really.