Editorial
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Volume 2012 Number 1
Health Politics
Neil Johnston: Friends of Science in Medicine
Peter Sayers: Confessions of a Frustrated Pharmacist
James Ellerson: $75.5 million in 5CPA lying idle. Why is it so?EPublications
The failure of Gollmann-Bouw: Are their products what our market wants?
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PDF version | Chris Wright |
Chris has spent many years in the pharmaceutical industry and is semi-retired. | |
Was it folly for one of the giants of automaton, MTS Medication Technologies to enter the fray in Australia with a product such as the Easy-Med machine?
Whilst many pharmacists remain either suspicious or ambivalent about automation in general, the automation of DAA’s is attracting scrutiny because of rising volume.
Some 350,000 DAA packs are currently filled weekly, rising to up to one million in about 5 years.
The Easy-Med machine is a ripper, but for the price it doesn’t have enough bells & whistles to impress in the longer term, when DAA standards will rise.
I accept that it is a far better proposition to the much-maligned sachet machines, but that doesn’t mean much. After all, sachet machines get a bit of traction simply because of the absence of a better solution. At last count there were less than 20 sachet machines in Australia and about 40 in New Zealand. This imbalance is due in part to the Monty Pythonesque attitude of the NSW PGA who insist it must be “proved” that medicines supplied in an automated DAA are the original medicines dispensed.
Potential “show-stoppers” for the Easy-Med machine was always going to be its size and price when pharmacies account for the vast majority of this particular target market.
As for size, it is always going to be difficult to sell an automated solution into a pharmacy when the professional service area has to be redesigned. I’d venture the comment that it is far more palatable to spend money to accommodate a pack dispensing solution rather than a DAA solution, simply because of the dynamics of the business.
Did it escape Gollmann-Bouw that the size of the Easy-Med machine meant an additional investment was likely to be mandatory in most pharmacies?
It’s a bit like every student should have a computer………just pity the installation costs were ignored, thus doubling the cost of the plan.
However, being an almost pathological devotee of automation in pharmacy I’d like to see the Easy-Med machine represented here. The question is who will step into the breach?
Certainly it might be said that the Americans and Germans view Australia as a bit of a technological backwater and their respective forays into our backyard have had an element of an Irish social club playing darts after an exhaustive tasting of Guinness about it in the past.
That said, to be successful MTS will need to address the manner in which their product is represented here.
To source the price of the Easy-Med machine was a challenge.
I called Gollmann-Bouw to ask this very question and while waiting for an obviously very busy sales department to answer the phone I conjured up visions of a Telsta call-centre type environment busily taking orders.
Anyway, for those amongst you who enjoy “Yes, Minister”.
Sales Person (SP). “Hello, can I help you”?
Chris Wright (CW) “Yes, thank you. I’m inquiring as to the price of the Easy-Med
machine”.
SP. “How many scripts do you do?”
CW. “Is script volume relevant to the price of the machine?”
SP. “No”.
CW. “In that case I just need to know the price.”
SP. “But I need to know how many scripts you do”.
CW. “I don’t do any”.
SP. “Are you a pharmacist?”
CW. “No, I’m not”.
SP. “So why do you want to know the price?”
CW. “I act for a group interested in automation”.
SP. “Who are they!” (Sounding very much like Margaret Thatcher.)
CW. “A group who won’t be buying the machine until they find out the price.”
And it went on…..such a strange marketing tactic.
However, the point is; Gollmann-Bouw (like many automated providers) rightly or wrongly was clearly fixated on advising a “transaction” price as a sales strategy.
In my view, wrong, wrong, wrong…….
Also, did it escape Gollmann that despite the fact the G-Series is a brilliant machine it denies the pharmacist valuable time.
As fellow i2p writer Garry Boyd commented in i2p in May 2009.
A video of the very impressive Gollmann G-Series machine shows the pharmacist leaving the patient to walk to the delivery point to retrieve the patient’s medicine. This takes about 8 seconds, yet the Gollmann G-Series exhorts a retrieval time of 8 to 15 seconds.
At 500 prescriptions a day, the pharmacist is spending an hour a day walking to the retrieval point and back to the patient!
Isn’t this ridiculous waste of time exactly what pharmacists are trying to avoid?
Brilliant machines do not necessarily deliver brilliant solutions.
Whilst this is not uncommon it is the myriad of tiny little issues that end up blowing such assumptions out of the water.
It may come as a surprise to some, but pharmacists are actually pretty cluey people.
I don’t know of any that aren’t capable of establishing a business case to introduce an automated solution to their business………..providing they know the price.
Chris Wright.
August 2010.
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Submitted by Peter P Rod on Wed, 04/08/2010 - 13:04.
I would have expected the Guild to have examined all these issues before giving the Gollmann-Bouw product its seal of approval. It seems to me that had the Guild been more circumspect and less focused on its own commercial self interest it may well have decided that no matter how brilliant the machine it would not find market acceptance in Australia. Have I missed something Charles?
Submitted by Rollo on Wed, 04/08/2010 - 06:47.
You say "Some 350,000 DAA packs are currently filled weekly, rising to up to one million in about 5 years."
Please advise source of this figure?
Submitted by Chris Wright on Fri, 06/08/2010 - 16:19.
The current 350,000 is an assessment based on a range of disparate information, some of which is from industry bodies.
In my experience I conclude that approximately 1,000 pharmacies provide somewhere between 200 and 400 DAA's per week to the RCF market, of which there is in excess of 160,000 beds.
Adding to this is the indigenous population (supplied under s100 conditions), shipping, pastoral, mining and those confined at her Majesty's pleasure. And not forgetting of course patients living in their own homes with the aid of "assisted care".
The assisted care market will no doubt rise dramatically due to the expected lack of RCF beds in the future and the fact baby-boomers are approaching an age consistent with medical dependency.
Therefore, the figure of a million per week seems reasonably accurate, albeit having been arrived at empirically.
Good question, Rollo.
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