RETAIL NEWS

The announcement that MinuteClinic and Cleveland Clinic have entered a clinical collaboration is a major example of how providers are communicating electronically to advance patient care, aside from e-prescribing.

While most of the retail-based clinic operators, such as MinuteClinic and Take Care Health Systems, have long used electronic health records to share patient information and ensure continuity of care, this streamlining of systems takes that communication yet one step higher.

WASHINGTON “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” That dictum, attributed to Ben Franklin, could apply to the increasingly urgent campaign by a wide-ranging assortment of pharmacy and retail advocacy groups to speak with one voice in policymaking circles. In the midst of an economic crisis, a dysfunctional healthcare system in dire need of new cost-saving solutions and a revolution in technology and communications, pharmacy leaders from every practice setting are acutely aware of the need for a united front.

A few months after San Francisco drug stores cleared their inventories of anything with tobacco, a city on the opposite side of the country passed a similar ban. Boston has banned tobacco sales in retail pharmacies as well, but its ban covers all stores that operate pharmacies, not just drug stores.