Last year, I wrote about Adrian, Minnesota and their hopes for a local telepharmacy shops. Adrian had lost their local pharmacy a year before, at the time I last wrote then had just been received funding from Blandin Foundation to move forward with their plans. Well, the Nobles County Review just ran a nice update on the telepharmacy project in Adrian.

They start with the history and it’s interesting to see that the technology was only one hurdle – and in many ways the easiest hurdle to overcome. They needed the technological solution but once it came to them they needed legal permissions which meant getting a pharmacists from a neighboring town to join in (as you might imagine pharmacies are well regulated), they needed funding, they needed space and then they needed to sign up customer who had become accustomed to getting their medication from out of town.

Here’s a picture of how that’s going…

The telepharmacy in Adrian has been open for one year. The machinations of the telepharmacy are amazing. In a demonstration by pharmacy technician Erpestad, the steps for filling a prescription were shown. Erpestad receives prescriptions via escripts. Other prescriptions are via telephone, which must be accepted by a pharmacist. In such cases, pharmacist Bryan Hagen of Sterling Drug, Worthington, accepts those prescriptions. Through electronic labeling and cameras that photograph the process, prescriptions are filled. “It is almost 100% impossible to make a mistake using this system,” says Erpestad.

Once the prescription is filled, final verification and approval must be given by a pharmacist. Contact, via broadband connection and almost instantaneous, is made with the Worthington pharmacist. A final “OK” is given. At this point, if the pharmacist in Worthington needs to speak to the customer about the medication, a teleconference is done right in the Adrian store. A customer can speak directly to the pharmacist, via the monitor and telephone receiver [to ensure privacy]. According to a local customer, “I can receive a prescription at the Adrian Clinic and by the time I get to the telepharmacy on Maine Street, the prescription has already been filled – it is very fast!”