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Story URL: http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39127400,00.htm

5 years ago: First prescription delivered online
Too bad PlanetRx.com didn't fare as well as its creation

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 27 January 2005

27.01.00: The first electronic prescription is delivered via healthcare site PlanetRx.com.

Lyle Berkowitz, a physician based in Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, wrote out a prescription on 21 January and sent it to PlanetRx.

The entire process took less than 30 seconds, according to Berkowitz, and ensured there were no handwriting errors or unwelcome drug interactions.

The medication was then delivered this week by the PlanetRx dispensary in Memphis, Tennessee.

27.01.05: Online prescriptions are commonplace these days in the US, and more recently the UK government legalised online drug sales.

However, as with so many internet pioneers, the company that first introduced the practice, PlanetRx, is no more - it declared bankruptcy and has gone out of business.

It wasn't too long after the fateful first e-prescription was delivered that things began to go awry for the company.

In August 2000, it laid off more than 50 per cent of staff and moved its headquarters from San Francisco to the more economical Memphis, Tennessee.

A few months later, in January 2001, PlanetRx was delisted from the Nasdaq - along with many once-high-flying dot-coms. Then in February of that year stopped selling health and beauty products - committing the ultimate humiliation of sending customers to once archrival Drugstore.com - and focused on specialist prescriptions for cancer, HIV and transplant patients. And it wasn't too long before even that was abandoned and the company closed its doors.