An article by Kate Traynor from next month's ASHP News interviews the the Navy's telepharmacy program project manager, Lieutenant Commander Marc Young (Lt. Justin Eubanks pictured above). From the article:
The article also mentions the Navy is waiting on funds to determine whether they'll expand the program to their inpatient pharmacies around the world and that they're talking to the Army and Air Force as well. There are also some interesting numbers on Navy pharmacists and technicians. Great, insightful article."We have a lot of sites, more than the other two services, that have technicians only," Young said of the Navy. "Some of these branch clinics with these technicians are literally almost like closets. They’re very small pharmacies; they’re doing 80 prescriptions a day, in some cases, with one technician."
"It’s difficult to hire folks in those places as well to get people to move to some of our remote locations," Young said.
Through telepharmacy, the technician-run pharmacy at the remote Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California, has access to pharmacists at the Robert E. Bush Naval Hospital in Twentynine Palms, California, Young said.
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A slight update to this info is found in the Defense Media Network article "New and evolving information technologies are transforming military medicine".
The Navy is still the only armed service using telepharmacy currently, though the VA and rest of the DoD plan to implement it later, and Navy has a few more plans about how they will implement inpatient telepharmacy when the time comes.
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