All roads lead to e-pharmacy

By PETER GRIFFIN

Moves are afoot in the health sector to get the "e-pharmacy" concept off the ground locally and link drug suppliers, doctors, pharmacies and patients via an electronic network.

It's a complex and political task bringing the health sector online from the people producing drugs to those consuming them, but one which a band of experts have taken upon themselves to progress.

Dr Stephen Chu, an associate professor of health informatics at the University of Auckland, is leading the push to create the protocols and standards that will underpin the system.

Chu last week gathered together major health sector players - from drug authority Pharmac to the district health boards to health IT providers such as HealthLink and isoft.

Those organisations have now set up a working group to develop medicine terminology with the e-pharmacy concept in mind.

But Chu said New Zealand was lagging behind the rest of the world in getting the systems in place. The US had invested heavily in the e-pharmacy model and wanted the majority of doctors to be filing e-prescriptions in a short timeframe.

New Zealand's e-pharmacy plans are too early in their development for the Government to have injected serious funding yet.

"When the Government isn't forking out money it's hard for it to mandate things to happen," said Chu.

And IT investment in the health sector is low - around 0.5 to 1.25 per cent of a health provider's annual budget, around a tenth of what the financial institutions spend on IT.

Chu said that overseas, consumers were becoming adept at buying drugs from online pharmacies.

"In America this is real. Patients are shopping online beyond their country's borders for drugs.

"Shopping for drugs in Canada and sending them into the US is up to 50 per cent cheaper."

Chu said e-prescriptions would cut down massively on errors in prescriptions that patients are given to take to their local pharmacy.

In the future, the prescription would be sent to a central database and accessed by the pharmacist directly.

Another step in the process is between wholesale drug suppliers and pharmacies. Generally orders are faxed through by pharmacies, which can lead to errors.

"There's a lot of inefficiency in the system. The same type of chemical formula can have different names and different packaging," said Chu.

"But we don't have to build just one e-pharmacy system. We're talking about standards in ordering and transmitting that will underpin the whole system."

The Auckland District Health Board plans to start e-prescription trials in the middle of next year.

Healthlink, which already links hospitals, GPs and diagnostic labs, is developing an e-prescriptions database and will be a key contender vying for work on broader e-pharmacy systems. The IT industry could expect a range of software and hardware contracts to emerge as the system takes shape.

With New Zealanders making 47,000 visits to GPs every day and the average senior citizen taking between 10 and 15 drugs, the e-pharmacy model has a good chance of bringing efficiency to the health sector.