Pharmagora 2016, what will our pharmacy look like in 2020?

[ad_1]

This weekend, all pharmacists from France and even from French-speaking African countries, were gathered for their annual meeting, Pharmagora 2016. The opportunity for them to rethink the pharmacy and the opportunity for us to prepare for big changes in the pharmacy we know … Do you want to know what your pharmacy will look like in 2020? So follow us!

If you expect to be received in your small neighborhood pharmacy by a robot, we will stop you right away, it's not for now. Finally, when we talk about the pharmacy of the future, it will above all be the triangular relationship between doctor-patient-pharmacist which is going to be turned upside down in part because of the arrival of smart health connected health devices.

To be treated and diagnosed remotely

A societal question often comes up when we talk about the health of French people, that of medical desertification of certain regions. In these, patients sometimes have to wait more than six months to obtain an appointment and this becomes very problematic when they need very extensive and regular medical follow-up, like some patients with cancer or 'a chronic disease. It is in such cases that the pharmacy of the future will become a real extension of the doctor's skills the country.

Indeed, the pharmacist will be able to take over and offer a real-time but remote monitoring. With the use of smart health connected health products, such as those developed by the brand iHealth, for example, the pharmacist or even the doctor will be able to obtain information on the health of his patient without leaving his office or his pharmacy.

However, it should be noted that this disruption of the patient's relationship with their caregiver will not imply substitution on the part of the pharmacist compared to the attending physician. The pharmacist will become a real assistant, an accompanist or even a privileged interlocutor so that the patients can understand their treatment and are followed.

A first series of tests are currently underway in the Aquitaine region (a medical desertification zone), for patients treated with chemotherapy. From a certain point, passed in the treatment, the patients are sent health home, this allows to free beds for other patients but also to offer these patients to return to a normal life. These patients need to be constantly monitored for their treatment to work. Thanks to smart health connected health objects, the doctor can therefore monitoring the progress without having to hold the patient close to him.

Print your medication at the pharmacy

So, if this technology is not immediately in our French pharmacies, with the progress and above all, the democratization of 3D printing, this would only be the logical next step for our pharmacies of the future. This technique has already been tested in the United States, and legislation has even authorized the first 3D printing of drugs.

This new vision of distance medicine does not stop there, since Google is currently developing a series of complex algorithms to give doctors tools to be able to perform a remote diagnostic. So, we could have fun imagining ourselves, pharmacies that would be just an empty shop. The patient enters the pharmacy and receives a remote consultation, through a screen, from this diagnosis, the pharmacist prints the necessary drugs.

In several years, the problems of storage or transport of medicines will only be a bad memory, just like the recycling of expired drugs. We will therefore be able to save a certain amount of money and above all be able to offer health care to isolated or poor people.

With, a short time ago, the first authorization from theUS Food and Drug Administration (FDA), this is a reality that will soon come to us and surely much faster than we thought. It is therefore a fundamental aspect of pharmacy that will change in a few years' time, in addition to the upheaval of the client relationship but also the role of the pharmacist in the world of health.

Pharmagora 2016, which spanned two whole days allowed many players in the field to think about the future of the profession, because if many smart health connected health objects are already distributed and known by the general public, it is necessary find the right people to train the pharmacists of tomorrow.

[ad_2]