" Porch Pirates " and the Theft of Home-Delivered Drugs

In response to my recent note about the increasing competition between Amazon-PillPack and CVS in terms of home delivery of drugs, Andrea Pitkus submitted the following comment:It'll be interesting to see how this evolves, especially with the increase of porch pirates.It would be disastrous to patient safety if porch pirates steal meds from these unsecure delivery mechanisms. It would harm patients who need vital medication and also the receivers of the stolen (black market) meds. Hopefully, narcotics and other important meds are not delivered in the pill packs.Although"preset" pills are valuable for patients that don't have dynamic changes with medications or dosing, they may not be as valuable for patients who are on medications that are titrated regularly such as coumadin.Andrea raises a significant concern that transcends the theft of home-delivered drugs -- billions of dollars of goods are sitting on consumers porches monthly with little security. I discovered a number of published articles about"porch pirates" with the following being of particular value:Security Moves to Prevent Amazon Package Theft. It offers a number of solutions for the theft of packages but not all of them seemed practical. For example, I suspect that many consumers ordering home-delivered goods will be unwilling to give up the convenience of this service by picking up their goods at an Amazon locker.Another option suggested in the article is to install a cur...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Healthcare Business Healthcare Innovations Medical Consumerism Pharmaceutical Industry Source Type: blogs