HIT Consultant Blog: “The law [HITECH, the law gives incentives to healthcare organizations to digitize personal health information before 2020], which also updates parts of HIPAA, gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services until mid-August to define what constitutes an electronic medical record. In Schmidt’s view initial requirements should start with strong authentication and [...]

As usual there were a lot of things happening this week in healthcare, and not all of it was technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I browsed this week.

NEPS Healthcare: “Managing the distribution of pharmaceuticals throughout the healthcare delivery process in hospitals and other healthcare institutions can provide opportunity for errors in both administration of medications and cost accounting. In addition to ensuring the five pharmaceutical “rights”— the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, at the right time, with the right [...]

Heathcareitnews.com:”One of the most striking examples of the impact of integration within the closed loop is Siemens, Hess notes. On one hand, providers who rated the Siemens Pharmacy product alone gave it a relatively low overall score of 70.8 out of 100. However, those providers who rated both Siemens Pharmacy and the Siemens bar-coding at [...]

If you float something out over the internet, someone is going to see it and keep you honest. Remember what I said, “There is always someone smarter, harder working, more motivated and better informed than me, and those are the people I want to hear from.” Well, those people have responded with some great information [...]

A short jaunt over to the EMR and HIPPA weblog led me to an interesting article in Time written by Scott Haig, MD. While Dr. Haig touches on a couple of positive features of electronic medical records (EMRs), he like many physicians, focuses on the negatives. He concludes that “Doctors and patients live in a [...]

I have posted many times on our system for barcoding medications in the pharmacy. The posts have included reference to our efforts to increase storage space.  Our goals have always been to store as many medications as possible within the carousel to take advantage of the software’s many safety features and inventory functionality.  Like all [...]

As usual there were a lot of things happening this week in healthcare, and not all of it was technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I browsed this week.

Pyxis PARx: “The Pyxis PARx® system automates the pick-check-delivery process to provide increased security during medication replenishment throughout the hospital. The system utilizes bar code scanning technology for real-time tracking and monitoring of medication handling, pharmacist review and delivery of medications. By providing a complete chain-of-custody on medications during distribution to the nursing unit and [...]

ISMP Medication Safety Alert! May 21, 2009 Vol. 14, Issue 10: “Please let us know if you identify problems with  a company’s unit dose package barcode. An example of an ARICEPT (donepezil) unit-dose package with a barcode  problem appears in Figure 1 (shown in the PDF version of the newsletter). Note that the labeling material has been applied to the [...]