Ordering Drugs Online Can Still Be a Headache
Pharmacy is one of the youngest e-commerce niches, and it shows.
Even the best online pharmacies remind me of the days about five years ago when my son was an infant, and I first tried to order groceries online.
It took an hour or more to input the order, and then all that really happened was that a fax machine at a Vons Pavilions store in West Los Angeles spit out my list. A guy arrived a day later to bring the food--for a $10 delivery charge, plus a tip. Typically, I would get a phone call from the store at some point during the day, explaining that the fax was unintelligible and asking if I could verbally repeat the order.
Today’s online pharmacies similarly have not yet figured out how to smooth the clunky process of taking orders, verifying insurance and prescription authenticity and delivering the product. It can take up to 10 days to receive a prescription--and you have to mail or fax the order to them or have your doctor call. Then you have to wait for an e-mail telling you whether the site accepts your insurance.
Still, the online pharmacy concept has a lot going for it. The two industry leaders, Drugstore.com and PlanetRx, have sites that are easy to navigate and offer free shipping on prescription drugs. Both also sell other items typically sold at regular pharmacies, including cosmetics and over-the-counter medications.
The PlanetRx site is a little friendlier than Drugstore.com, offering an easy-to-read list of product categories and a clearer explanation of policies under “frequently asked questions.”
I searched and searched for an explanation of the process that Drugstore.com uses to verify a prescription and was not successful, for example. PlanetRx spelled it out easily: Mail or fax in your prescription, have the doctor call or, in some cases, submit the prescription number and ask Web site personnel to phone your doctor to verify the order.
There’s another category of prescription Web sites, which most health-care experts caution against. These are the sites that claim to have doctors on staff both to prescribe the drugs and fill the prescriptions. Do a search for pharmacy or prescription drugs on any Internet search engine and various companies will pop up--long before you get to Drugstore.com and PlanetRx.
Such sites could prove dangerous on two levels: One, a doctor who has never examined you might prescribe a drug that is inappropriate. Two, consumers might misrepresent themselves to receive drugs they want, and the doctor would never know. Last fall, a television reporter named Roberta Baskin signed on to an Internet drug site under the name Robert Baskin and received a prescription for Viagra.
For me, the process of ordering drugs online is still so cumbersome that, unless I find myself in the market for some Viagra, I’m more likely to call the local drugstore and stop by on my way home from work to pick up the prescription.
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Drugs
Web sites reviewed: Drugstore.com: https://www.drugstore.com; PlanetRx: https://planetrx.com.
