What will the pharmacy of the future look like?
Last week in the Spanish city of Seville I spoke to an audience of pharmacists about the future of their profession and of healthcare in general.
Pharmacies are an extremely complex sector: Spain is one of the countries with the highest ratio of pharmacies per inhabitant, which are an important part of the healthcare system and enjoy considerable consumer trust. However, they have been treated very unfairly by successive governments, which during the recent pandemic reduced them to cutting cardboard coupons from boxes of medicines to paste them on paper prescriptions.
What should we expect from the pharmacy of the future? Amazon, for example, bought PillPack in June 2018 for just under $1 billion. The idea behind buying a company licensed to sell drugs online virtually everywhere in the United States was to become a drug distribution giant: patients order what they need, have it delivered to their homes, and in addition, instead of receiving boxes, receive a strip of paper wrappers with the date and time and the combination of pills they need to take, which is of great help for elderly people, who in many cases depend on some kind of pill dispenser which a family member loads for them.
Spain’s pharmacies offer a similar service, but in general, it is little known and little used. Its value is evident: from the…
