HEALTH

Not quite, but the continued evolution of Kerr Drug’s Community Healthcare Center store concept certainly offers a glimpse into what role community pharmacy could play in the American healthcare system of the future—and it goes far beyond just medication therapy management. Like the deal CVS Caremark announced in November with Generation Health, pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetics influence drug response, represents the new frontier of community pharmacy. And it’s a brave new world out there, to be sure.

NEW YORK While many companies are extending their brands into the social media arena, bringing an interactive brand experience to consumers at home, other companies are working toward extending that brand experience at the actual shelf, through such new mediums as smartphones. Evincii is one of those companies.

While Evincii declined to disclose future roll-outs around the PICKKA platform, this new app may be a glimpse into the future of merchandising, and at the very least the future of point-of-purchase material.

NEW YORK If there’s a huckster swindling supplements as the latest cure-all, turns out it’s not a supplement they’re swindling after all. If not an illicit pharmaceutical outright, it’s at the very least a mismarketed snake oil, and this band of supplement associations is helping to stamp those hucksters out.

NEW YORK PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report that the personalized medicine market will grow 11% per year is just another indication that the field could become the next generation of community pharmacy.

NEW YORK To paraphrase a quote often attributed — but probably incorrectly — to 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, if you like either laws or sausages, it’s best not to watch them being made.

That maxim could certainly apply to the seemingly endless bickering over the details of the health-reform debate in Congress. But in an era of constant Internet news feeds, blogging and instantaneous, on-the-spot reporting and analysis, it’s virtually impossible to avoid the spectacle.