INSIGHTS AND PERSPECTIVES

Issue: How do you stop meth addicts from circumventing current pseudoephedrine purchase restrictions by buying their respective PSE limits across several area pharmacies, a practice that’s been dubbed “group smurfing”? Answer: Create an electronic real-time logbook database so that law enforcement can catch these “smurfers” in the act.

A few months after San Francisco drug stores cleared their inventories of anything with tobacco, a city on the opposite side of the country passed a similar ban. Boston has banned tobacco sales in retail pharmacies as well, but its ban covers all stores that operate pharmacies, not just drug stores.

The announcement that MinuteClinic and Cleveland Clinic have entered a clinical collaboration is a major example of how providers are communicating electronically to advance patient care, aside from e-prescribing.

While most of the retail-based clinic operators, such as MinuteClinic and Take Care Health Systems, have long used electronic health records to share patient information and ensure continuity of care, this streamlining of systems takes that communication yet one step higher.

WASHINGTON “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” That dictum, attributed to Ben Franklin, could apply to the increasingly urgent campaign by a wide-ranging assortment of pharmacy and retail advocacy groups to speak with one voice in policymaking circles. In the midst of an economic crisis, a dysfunctional healthcare system in dire need of new cost-saving solutions and a revolution in technology and communications, pharmacy leaders from every practice setting are acutely aware of the need for a united front.

WASHINGTON Doesn’t anybody here pay their taxes? Tom Daschle, the former powerful leader of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, was one of President Barack Obama’s earliest Cabinet selections and his top choice to run both the huge federal healthcare bureaucracy and a new, White House office spearheading the planned overhaul of the healthcare system.

This full-page ad taken out by Walgreens is important as it comes at a time when healthcare reform is top of mind.

The ad serves as a call to action for healthcare providers, along with state and federal government, to work together to develop a high quality and affordable healthcare system. It also calls for payers, politicians and policy makers to recognize the value of an expanded role for retail-based clinics beyond simply acute care.

There has always been an undercurrent of thought that a pound of prevention might save an ounce of cure. And now that cure is outweighing prevention in terms of cost, combined with the fact that Americans are looking for just about any way to save a buck these days.

The deal gives a great deal of added heft to Pfizer’s pharmaceutical division — the combined Pfizer/Wyeth entity represents $70 billion in annual sales. Pfizer was already the leading pharmaceutical supplier at retail pharmacy for the 12 months ending November according to IMS Health. And that’s thanks in large part to the company’s Lipitor franchise. While Lipitor is the No. 1 drug sold in retail pharmacy today, the first patent protecting the statin expires as soon as 2010, though most analysts project a generic Lipitor will be introduced by November 2011.