Specialty Pharmacies Can Leverage New Technologies to Improve Cancer Care

In this clip, Matt Farber, MA, Senior Director of Patient Care and Advocacy at Walgreens provides insight into new areas of technology that pharmacists can use to help improve care when treating patients with cancer.

Transcript

There are a lot of new technologies emerging that can help pharmacists in treating cancer patients. And it's the job of pharmacists to determine what's going to be best and it might be a different answer for cancer patients than it is for other patients. So if we look at in the adherence and drug delivery area, for example, you can look at smart pill bottles and smart pills and, you know, pills that have chips embedded in them. I think we're still a little bit ways off in the cancer space in that, but the smart pill bottles exist today. A number of pharmacies are starting to use them. It does allow for new methods, new ways to help remind patients to take their medication. Typically, pharmacists rely on face-to-face interactions or telephonic interactions to tell patients 'Here's when you need to take your medicine,' and now technology can help to do that as well. So I think that looking at the delivery systems and the adherence systems that are growing today is definitely one area that pharmacists are starting to leverage in helping deliver quality cancer care.