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To: Sonny Blue who wrote (42822)	2/26/1999 4:21:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

The DOT looked so strong no matter what happened. Sonny, What is the DOT?? Thank you Glenn

To: Sonny Blue who wrote (42822)	2/26/1999 5:00:00 PM
From: Bill Harmond	Respond to of 164684

No problemo! I did a similar move with Ascend in December, 1994, and never bought it back! I learned a valuable lesson from that. You have the flexibility to fix things.

To: Sonny Blue who wrote (42822)	2/27/1999 8:33:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Online pharmacies can't eliminate the human touch By Andrea Orr PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb 26 (Reuters) - Real live pharmacists have enough trouble reading doctors' handwriting. What is a computer to do? That was just one of the questions surrounding the grand opening this week of drugstore.com, the online pharmacy that sells prescription drugs, along with things like Band-Aids and condoms, over the Internet. Online shopping is no longer as simple as clicking a mouse when the product being purchased requires a note from a doctor, and in some states, counseling from a licensed pharmacist. The growing number of online drugstores is highlighting one of the clunkier areas of Internet commerce, which not even the most sophisticated Web site can completely smooth over. Drugstore.com -- owned 40 percent on a diluted basis by Amazon.com <AMZN.O> -- estimates that millions of consumers visited its site on its opening day Thursday, and a larger-than-expected portion of them went to its pharmacy. The store had no immediate numbers on how many related phone calls it had to take, but it said many consumers were turned away before they got through to the pharmacy because the sheer volume of visitors to the site clogged its front door. This might be extrapolated to get a sense of the potential strain on its relatively small customer service staff. For obvious reasons, Redmond, Wash-based drugstore.com says it will not accept orders for prescription drugs that are sent by e-mail. The company will take orders over the phone, by fax or by regular mail. When there is a question about an order, or when it simply cannot read those infamously illegible doctors' notes, someone on staff will place a call to confirm the prescription. A forthcoming site, PlanetRx, says it will accept e-mail but will then call back the doctors to confirm the orders. Both companies also have staff pharmacists to answer questions and prevent patients from combining medications inappropriately. Imagine Amazon.com accepting hand-written orders for books and CDs, or having to call back to double-check orders. Despite drugstore.com's close association with the leading online bookseller, it seems that selling birth control pills and Prozac over the Internet could be far more dicey than selling books. Both drugstore.com and PlanetRx, based in the San Francisco area, have labored for months to build Web sites that can sell prescription drugs in a legal and proper manner and process co-payments from health insurers -- another complication. "It will be just like any mail-order pharmacy," said Suzan DelBene, vice president of marketing at drugstore.com. "We have 33 pharmacists on staff, and the ability to turn that up if needed." Another online drug store, Seattle-based Soma.com, which launched its site in January, said it expects to have to add to its staff of 50 to be able to continue to fill all incoming prescriptions promptly. Soma has a pharmacy equipped to dispense 50,000 prescriptions daily, but it estimates that each staff member dedicated to confirming orders by phone can handle only about 100 calls in a day's shift. At that rate, it is not hard to calculate how the human touch required in prescription drug sales could slow down an otherwise highly efficient process. But online pharmacies point out that any added costs of selling drugs online could be offset by the lower overhead that comes from not having to maintain a physical store. "And keep in mind, we expect somewhere north of 50 percent of our prescriptions to be maintenance medicine, or refills," said PlanetRx Chairman Bill Ruzzouk. Such orders could be handled swiftly without any calls to doctors. Over time, these stores say, they will be able to build computer databases that could be far more efficient than the corner drug store in tracking patient drug histories. Online drugstores could also offer shy shoppers a little bit of privacy, says...