A new pharmacy frontier

PharmaTrust MedCentre System, a telepharmacy kiosk, provides a solution, and it’s simple to use. A patient inserts his prescription, then, via two-way video conferencing, the patient is connected with a pharmacist who can counsel and dispense the required medication. The kiosk accepts benefits cards, as well as various options for co-payments.

Oakville, On.-based PCA Services provided a sneak peek of the MedCentre System on Oct. 6 at The Canadian Health Business Development Network Annual Meeting in Toronto.

While currently awaiting enabling regulations through Bill 179, there have been pilot projects at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (one at its Ambulatory Care Pharmacy and another at its Family Practice Unit), as well as Cambridge Memorial Hospital and Albany Medical clinic, a physicians’ complex in Toronto.

More pilot projects—one in an Aboriginal community and one at a university campus—are scheduled for November. Quebec has also signed on for a pilot.

The MedCentre Systems holds anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 different medications (puffers, tubes, boxes, etc.). And medications can be tailored to the machine’s location—if a community has a high incidence of diabetes and asthma, for example, then that particular kiosk will stock the respective medications for those ailments.

“It’s a distance- and time-breaking device,” says Peter Suma, president, chief operating officer and co-founder of PCA Services.

While the likely locations for the MedCentre System are hospital clinics, physician offices, pharmacies, healthcare centres and remote towns, Suma says the technology would benefits employers if a kiosk were installed at a company’s corporate office or warehouse, for example.

Think of the amount of working hours lost to employees’ doctors’ appointments, he says. Or if employees begin to fill their prescriptions (where they didn’t used to) because of the convenience of the kiosk, employees may stay healthy and cut back on sick days.

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