ASHP Proposes Telepharmacy Access is Key to Pharmacy's Future, Presents Guide at Midyear Meeting

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and their Research and Education Foundation held the Pharmacy Practice Model Initiative Summit in early November in Dallas, Texas where their PPMI (Pharmacy Practice Model Initiative) emerged, which includes 200+ statements about how pharmacy practice should be steered over the years to come. Among the statements passed by vote in the Technology category were:

• Telepharmacy technology, to enable remote supervision, should be available for use in pharmacy departments.
• Telepharmacy technology that allows pharmacists to interact with patients from a remote location should be available for use in pharmacy departments.

Not a month later, ASHP had their Midyear Clinical Meeting for 2010 in Anaheim, California from December 5th - 9th where one of the presentation sessions was titled "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Telepharmacy" and was meant to fill pharmacist in about various aspects of implementing telepharmacy:

• Describe ways you can work with regulatory agencies in your state to facilitate adoption of telepharmacy regulations.
• Explain the regulatory issues and environment under which telepharmacy services may be provided.
• Identify challenges in implementing a telepharmacy program at your facility.
• Name institution-specific requirements to be used when evaluating potential telepharmacy services.

Looks like great info and includes some citations of different state's laws. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of this before hand to post about it here, but slides from the presentation are available here(PDF).