Telepharmacy is another growing trend for providing pharmaceutical care to patients at remote locations where they may not have physical contact with pharmacists. It encompasses drug therapymonitoring, patient counseling, prior authorization, refill authorization, monitoring formulary compliance with aid of teleconferencing or videoconferencing. In addition, video-conferencing is vastly utilized in pharmacy for other purposes, such as providing education, training, and performing several management functions.

 

The remote site dispensing and patient education process was described as follows: once the prescription is sent from the remote clinics to the base pharmacy, the pharmacist verifies the hard copy and enters the order. The label is also generated simultaneously, and the label queue is transmitted to the remote site. When the label queue appears on the medication dispensing cabinet known as ADDS, the authorized person can access the medicine from ADDS followed by medication barcode scanning, and the printing and scanning of labels. Once those steps are done, the remote site personnel are connected to the pharmacist at base pharmacy via videoconferencing for medication verification and patient counseling.