“What’d I miss?” – Week of July 20th

As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.

– Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was #1 at the box office last weekend. No real surprise there.

– Check out the LED Illuminated Message Board at Chinavasion Electronics. Imagine your typically white board on steroids. Use special pens to write on the dry erase surface without the backlight and you see nothing special, but flip the switch and you get fireworks. I frequently use a white board at work to sketch out ideas. I think this is a must have, and for under twenty bucks, it’s a bargain.

– Healthcare IT Consultant: “Can Pen And Paper Help Make Electronic Medical Records Better? – ScienceDaily (July 20, 2009) — The results of a new study of the pen and paper workarounds employed by healthcare providers who use an electronic medical record system may help make electronic medical records even more useful to health-care providers and the patients they serve….The most frequently cited reasons for using paper workarounds were efficiency and ease of use. Second most frequently was as a memory aid. The third most frequent reason was to recognize or alert others to new or important information.” – It’s all about changing the culture we practice in, and believe me I’m in the same boat as every one else.

– How about the “50 must-follow @Health20 heroes on Twitter“? It’s a pretty impressive list. You’ll certainly keep yourself busy trying to read all those ‘Tweets’.

- The Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists have issued therapeutic guidelines for monitoring of vancomycin treatment for Staphylococcus aureus infection. The summary of consensus recommendations is published in the August 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Disease.  There’s nothing earth-shattering in the guidelines, but at least it’s all in one location now. The guidelines are available for free in PDF format here.

– The President is going to visit the Cleveland Clinic in hopes of finding the magic bullet for health care reform. Good luck.

– Apple continues to make other phone manufacturers unhappy as users drop their phones in favor of the iPhone. On the flip side, people continue to pound AT&T for terrible service and multiple problems. Wake up Apple, it’s time to open the iPhone up to other service providers.

– Engadget: “Looks like Hitachi has made some serious headway on the biometric payment system we first heard about way back in the halcyon days of 2007. According to the Mainichi Daily News, the company is currently testing its Finger Vein Authentication System internally, with the device serving as a method of payment for vending machines and the like. Once it’s proven that employees are able to get their Koala’s March and Hi-Chew without incident, the plan is to up the ante, with high precision ID systems that combine finger vein and finger print authentication systems for military use.” – Hey, how about a little love for pharmacy tech. We could use a high precision ID system like this for our automated dispensing cabinets.

– I found a new medical search engine built on data collected from other medical RSS feeds, it’s called Medworm and I like it.

– Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued an apology over the removal of illegally sold copies of the book 1984 downloaded onto several Kindles. Bezos exact quote: “This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.” – Ouch!

– There’s a new Wiki describing remote dispensing. Remote dispensing is a growing area in long term care and prisons. Companies like Talyst are developing new technology to promote this relatively untapped arena. I think acute care pharmacy could make use of some of this new technology;it’s just a matter of working out the kinks.

– Some of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen can be found on YouTube by searching for “Hitler gets banned from Xbox live“. The videos use some harsh language, but are laugh-out-loud funny.