With Internet companies already selling everything from lingerie to lawn tractors, using the Web to bypass the drug-store seems like a natural. Sure enough, within the next two months a number of well-funded start-ups plan to bring the $170 billion-a-year pharmacy industry to the Internet age. The new companies, with names like Drugstore.com, PlanetRx and Soma.com, are targeting the ““sweet spot’’ of drugstores: prescription and over-the-counter drugs, vitamins, health and beauty products. Order online, and they’ll ship you the product overnight (faxed or e-mailed prescriptions are verified). The companies will have pharmacists available to answer questions by phone or e-mail and will offer personalized features that, for example, will alert you when you’re due for a medicine refill.
The start-ups must get over a lot of hurdles–selling prescription medicine is more complicated than selling books. For one thing, the new companies have to meet stringent government regulations regarding the storage of certain medicines, and they need licenses to fill prescriptions in each state where they do business. They’ve also had to compete with each other to establish relationships with HMOs and insurance companies, which pay for more than 80 percent of all prescription drugs.
The Net start-ups also face competition from brick-and-mortar stores. Real-world chains like Walgreens, Rite Aid and Drug Emporium, which already let customers order refills on the Net, each say they are considering filling new prescriptions, too. Most ominously for the Web start-ups, some of the companies that coordinate insurance claims on prescriptions–outfits called pharmacy benefit managers–think this territory should be theirs. ““The difference between what we have plans to do and what these upstarts are trying to do . . . is not really that great,’’ says Per Lofberg, the president of Merck-Medco, the country’s largest PBM.
Beyond their rivalries, the new crop of Internet drugstores will need to combat the image of shady online Viagra and Propecia merchants who sold the drugs without prescriptions. That might take more than offering a way to avoid a 10-minute drive to the local drugstore.
TRYING TO LIGHT THE NIGHT RUSSIA’S ATTEMPT TO light the Earth’s dark realms from outer space last week failed to shine. A ““space mirror’’–dubbed Znamya-2.5–made from metal spokes and highly reflective fabric was supposed to twirl open from a spacecraft like a blooming flower. The Russians hoped it would reflect rays from the sun down to Earth, creating a beam of light 10 times as bright as the moon’s that would travel from Kazakhstan to Alberta, Canada, like a four-mile-wide spotlight from heaven. Instead, it opened halfway and then hung limply like a wind-wrecked umbrella after getting fatally snagged on an antenna. Astronomers cheered the setback, citing their need for dark skies for deep-space observation and one particularly scary possibility: orbiting advertising in the night sky.
