VALLEY FORGE, Pa. -- After a lengthy development and a careful assessment of its acceptance by customers in a test-store setting, AmerisourceBergen Corp. is set to launch a network-ready health assessment kiosk that comp any planners hope will replace blood pressure machines in many drug stores.

The kiosks were designed, developed and built by IBM and have the look of sleek, ergonomic seats that bear little resemblance to the boxy, walk-up interactive health kiosks that some retail pharmacies adopted in the early 1990s. And they present drug store customers with a far wider range of options for health self assessment and information about disease states, prevention, nutrition and their own prescription data.

The kiosks feature interactive patient self-screening technology from Stayhealthy Inc., a health care partner that also provides a live pharmacist help line. They include a body composition analyzer that allows patients to analyze their own ratio of body fat and print out the results, as well as blood pressure screening and Internet access to health information sites. Diabetic patients and those with high cholesterol levels also can upload data from their own devices to a personal, password-protected online health record.

"There's a way to connect some patients' glucometers," explained Barbara Brungess, manager of corporate and investor relations for AmerisourceBergen. "The machine can gather all that data and take measurements over time."

Dan Ramirez, who heads the kiosk program as corporate vice president of program management or AmerisourceBergen, explained that "patients can come up to the kiosk at the pharmacy, upload interactive diagnostic data to a secure site and can print their records up and take them to their physicians, he said. "More important, they create a history of their condition, which only the patient, the physician and the pharmacist can access."

Ramirez said AmerisourceBergen is bringing the machines to market in the belief that their time has come. "Europeans have a lot of experience with kiosks," he told Drug Store News. "In the U.S., kiosks in pharmacies haven't really taken off. But we feel that we could replace blood pressure machines and give pharmacies this functionality for a lower price than they pay for the blood pressure machine alone."

Added Brungess: "We're really excited about it. These machines will be able to offer a lot more than blood pressure screenings ... and they're very user-friendly."

An early target market for the kiosks will be the company's two independent pharmacy networks, Good Neighbor Pharmacy and Family Pharmacy. But the company also is "taking orders and getting commitments" from other chains and independents, Brungess said. "There will be some cost to the client, but we're working to defray that" through on-screen advertising, corporate sponsorships and other means, she added.

Under a joint operating contract with AmerisourceBergen, IBM will provide ongoing in-store maintenance of the machines via its national network of 7,000 technicians.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permis