PharmaTouchStone, from WaveData, is an easy-to-use application built on the Microsoft® Access 2000 platform*. The database requires a minimum of 250 Mb. of free memory available on the hard drive, for trouble-free operation.

Subscribers to PharmaTouchStone receive their data either by CD, generally on a monthly basis, or by email, with the data transmitted by compressed zip-file.
Our users are able to specify whether they wish to receive the complete database, with the thousands of product prices it holds, or simply nominate a selection of “molecules” which cover their fields of activity.

In addition, our flexible approach allows users to choose how many months of recent and historic price activity they wish to monitor; typically the selection is anything from 1 month to 24 months, (although we can go back as far as September 2000) with most subscribers opting to receive the last 3 or 6 months of recent price history.

The Main Reports functions allow users to access the core price data which lies at the heart of PharmaTouchStone. The four basic enquiries cover prices sorted by:

• Product Name

• Distributor Price List

• Molecule

• Generic Manufacturer
  
  

  Within each category, the user can apply a series of filters, which allow them to make very finely defined searches for the required price information. For instance, it is possible to define a search for the exact formulation of a given proprietary brand, comprising strength & pack size, origin and type of end-user (pharmacist or dispensing GP); the enquirer can further decide whether to include generic equivalents or parallel imports in their price search criteria & which selection of distributors they wish to consider.

The information presented in these reports is extremely comprehensive. Some searches, especially on widely available products, can generate reports containing many hundreds of lines of recent or historic price information.

As the PharmaTouchStone database utilises the Microsoft® Access platform, a key feature is the ability to download any report, at a single keystroke, into an Excel (or similar) spreadsheet, for further modelling or analysis.

* [Microsoft® Access 2000 is part of the Microsoft® Office 2000 Suite, which itself runs on the Microsoft® Windows operating system.]