If a Hungry Retailer Cuts Into the Pharmacy Pie...

“Just imagine it…drone-delivered medications. Sameday delivery. Points on your Amazon Prime account,” writes Pharmacy Times^® contributor Timothy Aungst, PharmD, in “Want to Work for Amazon? You May Get the Chance Soon” on pharmacytimes.com. Aungst discusses recent speculation that Amazon is vying to get into the pharmacy business and capitalize on the health care business front. Laws and regulations surrounding pharmaceutical and dispensing rules will certainly be a hurdle, but more online pharmacy delivery companies continue to come to market, so the hurdles aren’t impassible.

These changes may be viewed as healthy competition that can benefit patients, improve cost transparency, and challenge pharmacy benefit managers, but how will pharmacists be affected? Will we start seeing Amazon ads seeking pharmacists, and could they provide patient counseling via telemedicine? The market and technology are aligned in Amazon’s favor. If legislation aligns as well, pharmacists could see rapid changes in their employment opportunities. This could be good for some individuals, and not for others.

Speculation about the future tends to be hyperbolic, and reality often turns out to be somewhere between the best and worst scenarios imagined. As always, the best way to prepare is to keep learning. For pharmacists, this means doing whatever it takes to remain the go-to medication specialists for other health care professionals and for patients. Therefore, it is imperative that pharmacists have reliable information on specific patient populations, such as what we offer in this Women’s Health issue. Carefully selected to help you serve your female customers, the topics in this issue include drugs and pregnancy, domestic violence, and OTC products for feminine care.

With so much information available, women seek out and appreciate the accessible, individualized guidance and counseling that pharmacists offer. In addition to providing understandable, timely health care information to patients, pharmacists can address lifestyle factors and manageable risks. A face-to-face interaction can go a long way toward reinforcing the importance of personal responsibility among patients who need encouragement.

It is always a pleasure for the Pharmacy Times® team to learn that it is on track in providing pharmacists with the value they seek. Therefore, we are pleased to announce that Pharmacy Times® once again outranked all competitors in serving you, the retail pharmacists in the trenches, in readership and exposure among the total sample studied, according to the 2017 Kantar Media Pharmacy Readership Data. We couldn’t achieve this high honor without you, so we thank you and pledge to continually strive to provide the most useful and up-to-date information to help in your everyday practice.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy the summer!

Mike Hennessy, Sr

Chairman and CEO