DAVID BOYCE
Senior Partner & Managing Director
DipPharm, FPS.

After matriculating from Pinelands High School, Cape Town, and performing his Citizen Force Training in the South African Navy, David George Boyce studied pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy at the Cape Technikon, Cape Town, qualifying as a pharmacist in 1971.

Since his student days he has been actively involved in organisational pharmacy at local, national and international level. Thus he was elected Chairman of the Cape Peninsula Pharmacy Students Association (CPPSA) in 1971 and was President of the South African Pharmaceutical Students Federation (SAPSF) in 1972/3, having represented South Africa at the Congresses of the International Pharmaceutical Students Federation (IPSF) in Jerusalem and Paris, inter alia, in 1972, 1973 and 1974. He also served two terms on the 6-person Executive Committee of the world body. He edited student pharmaceutical publications at local, national and international level, was the only student member of the Publications Committee of the Cape College for Advanced Technical Education, and was one of the two founder members of the Students Representative Council of the College.

After qualifying as a pharmacist and obtaining registration with the SA Pharmacy Council, David gained two years experience in hospital pharmacy before spending ten years in community pharmacy - seven of these as a partner in a pharmacy in Florida, Transvaal.

He continued, however, to be active in professional affairs. Thus he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern Transvaal Branch (now the Southern Gauteng Branch) of the Pharmaceutical Society of South Africa for more than twenty-five years and served two terms as Chairman of the Branch - from 1979 through 1981. He also served as a member of the Business & Contracts Committee of the Branch from 1979 through 1997 (seventeen of those years as Chairman), was a Director of the TPS Mutual Trust (Pty) Ltd from 1979, and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of that company for a period of 15 years until 1996. In 1981 he had been charged with and achieved the turnaround of the TPS.

He was also a Director and the Chairman of Pharmaceutical Management Services (Pty) Ltd - of which company SuperScripts and TPS Drug Information Services were subsidiary companies launched by David - since 1981, and of Healthnet (Pty) Limited since 1991. Again, he was the driving force behind the creation and establishment of the latter company.

At a national level, he was a member of the Contracts Management Committee of the PSSA (later reconstituted as the Board of Directors of Medikredit (Pty) Ltd (a business transformation for which he was responsible) from 1980 through 1995. He is a member of the Institute of Pharmacy Management International, and has served as an executive member of the Transvaal chapter of the South African Medical Informatics Group (SAMIG).

He also served on the Education Liaison Committee of the Witwatersrand School of Pharmacy for twelve years and was, amongst other things, involved in the creation of the Division of Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Technology at that institution, as well as being coordinator of the project to create a Chair of Pharmacy at the University of the Witwatersrand – a project which achieved its objective in 1992 with the launch of the Degree course in Pharmacy in the Faculty of Medicine at Wits University. David was also a member of the six-person national committee responsible for marketing the profession - the Pharmacy Professional Awareness Campaign (PPAC), a project of which he was a founder member - since inception of the project in 1983 until 1998. David's special fields of interest within pharmacy lie primarily in pharmaceutical benefit management, in health economics and pharmacoeconomics, and in computerised information systems. He has been a Ministerial appointee to the Scheduling Committee, an expert committee of the South African Medicines Control Council, since 1989, and has served on special expert committees of the statutory S.A. Pharmacy Council, dealing with managed health care and tariff issues, on which latter topic he has also served as a consultant and expert witness.

SuperScripts, a highly sophisticated computerized dispensary management system, was designed and developed by him under the auspices of TPS Information Systems (which has since been incorporated as SuperScripts (Pty) Ltd), while he has also designed drug information database systems and systems for the market research analysis of prescription data. He developed the NAPPI medicine coding system which has become the de facto standard in South Africa in 1992. Together with Geraldine Bartlett he was jointly instrumental in creating and launching the TPS Drug Information Centre - a professional service project sponsored by one of the companies of which he was Chief Executive Officer, in 1987, and he initiated, developed and established Healthnet as the first online, realtime Claims Transaction Processing facility in the South African medical scheme industry in 1991.

He was elected Chairman of the MediKredit Board during 1991, and was instrumental in the 1994/95 consolidation and restructuring of MediKredit under the banner of Healthcare Alliance. He negotiated the formation of the MediKredit Partnership between GlaxoWellcome, Eli Lilly and the Pharmaceutical Society (through Pharmacy Alliance) as well as the sale of the Group to the international consortium. He then served as Chief Executive Officer of the new MediKredit Group until 1998.

Together with Dr Graham Hukins, David was a founding partner in Managed Healthcare Systems (Pty) Limited, a full range managed care services company founded in 1986. The firm is a leader in the design and management of managed care solutions in the South African medical scheme industry, employing more than twelve consultant medical practitioners around the country and having developed leading edge information systems technology.

He was elected a Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society in 1986, and is a recipient of the Alfred Radis and Julius B. Israelsohn Awards, respectively. He is the author of some 62 papers and technical reports. He was a consultant and advisor to the Minister of Economic Coordination from 1988 to 1992.

David is married, and he and his wife Linda have two sons - Poul and Richard. His primary leisure interests are reading and music. 

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