Matthew Dillon at GottaBeMobile has come up with a great concept for a new tablet device that he calls “ink padâ€. The most entertaining thing about the concept is that I have designed several of these on paper over the years myself. My scribbles are recorded in various notebooks lying around the house. Like Matthew, I too love Tablet PCs but have always felt that there is still a yet to be developed device that would be better.
Month: October 2009
Cool Technology for Pharmacy
The InstyMeds Prescription Medication Dispenser is a fully automated prescription dispensing machine. It is  designed to be used in high traffic areas where quick medication turnaround is desired and a physical pharmacy is unavailable, such as emergency departments (ED) and acute care clinics.
The dispenser has just over 100 medication slots that can each hold a medication magazine with up to 11 prepackaged medication bottles. The formulary for the InstyMeds machine is site specific and designed by the InstyMeds Corporation. Items in the example formulary that I viewed included amoxicillin capsules, amoxicillin suspension, Auralgan otic drops, Z-Pak, Augmentin, acetaminophen tablets and elixir, ibuprofen, Vicodin, Darvocet, etc. All the items you would expect from a short visit to the ED or for little Joey with an ear infection at the urgent care. The formulary in the InstyMeds machine can be altered based on seasonal trends and inventory replacement is automatically  shipped to the location when needed based on real time inventory tracking. In addition, consumables such as printer paper are also automatically tracked by the InstyMeds Corporation via an internal web cam.
All roads lead to Rome, err….I mean Twitter.
Until the next big thing comes along Twitter is king. That’s why I found this Tweet from Robert Scoble so interesting. The Tweet itself simply let me to a blog article written by Louis Gray. The blog discusses two distinctly different approaches to sharing information; Louis Gray’s approach versus Robert Scoble.
Louis utilizes Google Reader to collect and sort various RSS feeds. Any story, blog, article, etc. that he finds interesting get pushed to Twitter via the share feature in Google Reader (see the graphical representation at Louis’ site).
In the other corner you have Robert “using not RSS, but Twitter, to share the best of the technology Web as it streams on his screen.†Robert appears to be making extensive use of his Twitter Favorites.
Are e-patients better informed or just harder to treat?
I found an interesting article at EHR Bloggers that talks about the possibility of easy access to information via the internet resulting in difficult-to-treat patients and higher healthcare costs. The concern raised in the NPR article describes the effect of information dissemination without context or interpretation – it happens anyway, with direct-to-consumer advertising in all … Read more
Lexi-comp making headway on drug information software for the Palm Pre
Earlier today Lexi-comp offered a sneak peak of their new drug information software for the Palm Pre. That’s exciting news for all you Palm Pre owners out there. Lexi-comp offers one of the most comprehensive drug information packages available and is certainly a favorite among pharmacists. The Palm Pre is a great device to use … Read more
Fujitsu playing healthcare angle with Windows 7 touch features
eWeek: “Health care is a particular market that can benefit from the combination of touch- and pen- input combined with multitouch, and Moore offered the example of a physician meeting with a patient: viewing the patient’s records vertically, turning the tablet PC horizontally to view an X-ray, and quickly pinching or expanding his or her … Read more
D&D on Microsoft Surface table
Surface blog: “I don’t want to put any pressure on Michael and the team over at Carnegie Mellon University, but you guys should be getting an A for your class project this semester. Their Dungeons & Dragons experience called “Surfacescapes†on Microsoft Surface is amazing. This is the future of how computers will aid in … Read more
Quick hit – what value do you place on experience?
It’s been a bad week for me in terms of hospital systems giving me problems. We’ve had issues with our electronic document management system, our Pyxis system and the nursing interface with pharmacy; lots of late nights and early mornings. Who knows, maybe it has something to do with the full moon coming up tomorrow. … Read more
“What’d I miss?” – Week of October 11th
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.
Cool Technology for Pharmacy
A group of researches has created a hydrogel membrane that “opens†and “closes†in response to magnetic flux. The discovery could lead to delivery systems capable of precision drug therapy for a host of conditions.