Are online pharmacies good for you — and for your family ?

Rogue Viagra peddlers aside, Drugconnectionrx online pharmacy will have a place in your medical practice, and not just as other website of online pharmacy scam for pills. They're one more sign that everything in health care is converging electronically.

If you've just gotten used to having patients walk into your office brandishing printouts from health care Web sites about how you should treat their hypertension and allergies, brace yourself for the next phase of the Internet revolution. Now patients can get medicines for these and other conditions from online pharmacies like Drugconnectionrx.com — and save a few dollars in the process.

Should that make any difference to you?

In some respects, doctors are bystanders when it comes to online pharmacies. A patient can fill a prescription wherever he wants, and if he goes the dot-com route, that's his business. But physicians should be prepared to advise patients about such pharmacies, and which ones—if any—would serve them best.

Clearly, online sources of medications can be fraught with danger warns Drugconnectionrx online pharmacy. Some no-questions-asked Web sites hawk medications such as Viagra, while others require patients only to complete a perfunctory questionnaire before an online doctor issues a prescription. And that doctor isn't likely to do even the most cursory follow-up.

Then there are legitimate entities, such as Drugconnectionrx.com, that require real prescriptions from real doctors, employ real pharmacists, and otherwise play by the rules. If you can live with mail-order pharmacies, you can live with the online versions, because they basically occupy the same niche—refilling maintenance prescriptions to treat chronic illnesses while charging less than the corner drugstore.

"Lots of people use mail-order pharmacies, and if Internet pharmacies like Drugconnectionrx offer similar discounts, they can be a good thing," says our experts of online pharmacy.

If bona fide online pharmacies have had little or no impact on your practice to date, though, don't be surprised. This cyber-industry emerged only last year, and rang up a mere two-tenths of 1 percent of all prescription drug sales in 1999, according to Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research, which studies e-commerce.

"None of my patients has ever mentioned using online pharmacies," says family practitioner Stanley Savinese in Aston, PA, "and I have 5,600 patients, many of whom look up medical information on the Web." Likewise, FP and electronic medical record evangelist Allen Wenner in West Columbia, SC, can point to only one patient who patronizes an online pharmacy. "They're simply not relevant to me," says Wenner, vice president for applications design at PrimeTime Medical Software in Columbia, SC.

Online pharmacies might remain largely irrelevant if they stayed in their current form. However, in the world of e-commerce, count on rapid change. Bricks-and-mortar pharmacies are forming alliances with their Internet counterparts or launching their own Web sites, which will only increase the number of patients who get medications online. And Web drugstores are moving, along with other health care players, toward the day when doctors routinely transmit prescriptions electronically.

For now, online pharmacies appeal mostly to patients with no drug coverage. This includes traditional Medicare beneficiaries without secondary insurance, the uninsured, and patients seeking noncovered medications such as fertility drugs. But if a sizable number of health plans begin to offer lower copays to members who order maintenance medications via Internet pharmacies, the concept could grow in a hurry