Telepharmacy in Iran from the perspective of ethics in pharmacy: Feasibility study, opportunities and challenges

Telepharmacy is the use of communication technology to provide pharmaceutical care to patients. It can be used for different purposes and in different situations such as epidemies, for disabled patients or those who do not have access to pharmacies. This service became especially important during the 2019 Coronavirus virus epidemy. Given the positive effects of this technology in delivering pharmaceutical care in epidemies, it is necessary to assess the risks and benefits of its implementation in Iran health system.

Searching in Pubmed, Scopus, Cochrane, and SID databases was done with the right keywords. 346 articles found, unrelated articles, duplicates were excluded and 225 remained, after evaluating the full text of the articles, 65 articles had included.

Telepharmacy was associated with enhanced interprofessional communications and collaborations, job satisfaction, documentation, improved communication between patients and professions, increased rate of adverse drug events identification, saving time and the money, decreased medication errors, morbidity and mortality among drug consumers. Undesirable outcomes such as higher cost for providing infrastructures, more time for education of stuffs and patients, define and revise politics and interaction with current regulations are risks associated with telepharmacy which need more attention. So far, no article has been found that evaluate the role of telepharmacy in epidemies.

Studies demonstrate that telepharmacy is associated with desirable outcomes for health system, stuffs, patients and drug consumers. Further studies are needed to investigate other outcomes of telepharmacy in different settings of health system.