DCH Health First ASP to Target Pharmacies

Vertical ASP DCH Health was first to market last week with PharmaLinx, a universal, standards-based pharmacy administrative system.

DCH Health drives transactions, maximizes asset utilization and facilitates communication between all parties in the pharmaceutical market.

Chris Blackley, president and chief executive officer, explained to ASP-News that the retail pharmacy market consists of chains, mass merchants and retail grocery store chains and independent stores. “The dollar value for prescription medication is growing at 18 percent a year, and there are about 6,000 open pharmacist positions,” Blackley said. “This creates a lot of pressure.”

With that in mind, DCH Health took an application originally designed for high volume mail-order pharmacy and licensed it to provide a hosted solution for retail, mail order, central fill and online pharmacies to create PharmaLinx

DCH Health charges a flat monthly fee per store for PharmaLinx. Depending on the number of different services desired by the store, the typical cost range is from $400 to $800 a store.

ASP-News learned that DCH Health is currently in negotiations with one of the largest chains in the U.S. and is talking with several national chains to implement PharmaLinx.

“There is no competing product right now,” Blackley said. “We’ll remain in this unique position for a short period of time and plan to continue to take advantage of it.”

Blackley realizes that as a technology provider, it is important to create trust in your market. “Security is a major element of trust,” he said.

The company’s recent partnership with VeriSign re-enforces this concept. DCH Health integrated VeriSign’s wireless and OnSite trust services with its PharmaLinx to enable secure transmission of confidential prescription and payment information over wireless and wired networks using personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the ubiquitous Web browser.

Co-branded with VeriSign, DCH Health will authorize, and VeriSign will issue digital certificates to pharmacies, enabling physicians and pharmacists to transmit authenticated, encrypted and digitally signed electronic prescription information.