I finally had an opportunity to roam around the exhibit hall at the ASHP Midyear today. Of course I had to sacrifice a session to attend, but it was worth it. If you’ve never been in the exhibit hall at one of these events you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Most of the displays are completely worthless, but I did have a couple of goals in mind as I entered the hall.
MedBoard
I’ve heard quite a bit about MedBoard since my arrival at the ASHP Midyear. We spent a few minutes in the Talyst User Group talking about it, I spent some time talking to a group from Pharmacy OneSource about it, and it was the hot topic of discussion at the Pharmacy Automation Operations Networking Session today.
I’ve previously listed MedBoard as one of my Cool Technology for Pharmacy, but based on the current status of the product I don’t think it is right for our facility. The process could be of value in certain circumstances, but requires the introduction of manually scanning barcodes on the medication for tracking. It might be worth another looks when a more passive tracking approach becomes available, i.e. RFID.
Drug Information for the Droid
Some drug information software vendors, PEPID, ePocrates and Micromedex, said I could access their information via the Droids internet browser. No thanks. Lexi-Comp currently has drug information software for the Android OS, but not specifically for the Droid. They did tell me that the Droid version is four to six weeks away.
TheraDoc
Our hospital has owned a product called Stellara for a few years now, but haven’t done anything with it. TheraDoc inherited Stellara accounts less than a year ago and I have been asked by our pharmacy department to get the application up and running. TheraDocs can provide pharmacy users with real-time access to patient information for the pharmacy system as well as lab and ADT. In addition, rules can be designed to alert pharmacists of patients with certain high risk medication situations, allergies, inappropriate antibiotic therapy, high or low lab values, etc. It basically boils down to a clinical workflow engine designed for pharmacists.
Pharmacy OneSource offers an equivalent system called Sentri7, which I have also blogged about. Our pharmacy is currently evaluating another Pharmacy OneSource product, Simplifi 797, and I would like to stick with a single vendor. Decisions will be based on many important factors, <cough> cost <cough> .
Alternative barcode solution
Barcoding certain dosage forms can be a headache and several of my technicians have tasked me with finding them an “easy and straightforward” solution.
Two companies that piqued my interest were Pearsonmedical and Epson. Pearsonmedical offers a very nice flag label and easy to use software called m:print. The software utilizes the NDDF formulary from First Data Bank to access drug information based on the product being used. Epson is the first company I’ve seen to date offering barcode labels with color ink. Their SecurColor On-Demand Color InkJet Printer is pretty slick. I was skeptical, but the labels look good and don’t smear.
All in all it turned out to be a successful jaunt around the exhibit hall.
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Hi Jeff,
Glad to see that you are looking round the hall and you are correct about most of the exhibits!! Since you bought up the Theradoc and Sentri 7 systems I wanted to add a new player into the mix. ICNet and its antimicrobial stewardship module ABXALERT. We launched this at ASHP with our US partner bioMerieux. We fulfill the requirements that you have laid out for the other systems but we also can do it in a ‘competively priced’ model. There is plenty of information on our website but wanted to be sure that you were aware of us too.
If you want any other information then please feel free to contact me.
@Tom K-W
I have just realised my terible faux pas with your name – my apologies!!
I’ve actually seen the MedBoard in use at a hospital, and my understanding is that it is a great help in that one actually doesn’t have to scramble to find out precisely where meds are in the process. That’s something very useful, I gather, when a nurse calls down asking for the medication now. And, as you noted in your “Cool Technology” post about it, the MedBoard can let other healthcare professionals, especially nurses, find out where their meds are. I don’t recall if this hospital had implemented that feature yet, but I do know that, at least, it was something that they were looking at. It’s a really neat system, and I was very impressed with it.
As an aside, this hospital happens to be one of the beta test sites for McKesson’s new unit dose robot, PROmanager-Rx. Since I have been looking at pharmacy admin residencies at Midyear (I’m a fourth-year PharmD student at Ohio State), I think that this is a site I should take a serious look at!
Jerry – thanks for the call outs on MedBoard, Simplifi797 and Sentri7! Hope the #midyear2009 is all you hoped.
charles
Midyear was great! It was the first opportunity I’ve had to attend and I think it was well worth it. I learned a lot and met some amazing people.
Deron –
While I agree that MedBoard could provide benefits in certain situations, it’s just isn’t a good fit us. We are 95%+ Pyxis dispensing, run two IV batches per day and don’t have a large volume of missing medication calls. I believe the benefit of such a system as MedBoard would be maximized when a majority of medications are being dispensed from the pharmacy, i.e. the “traditional way”. In addition, remember that this a manual system which always makes results dependent on human factors. Some technology is cool as heck, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is always practical.
I’m glad to hear that your are looking at a residency site with lots of cool technology. You’re the future. If I can ever be of assistance, please feel free to contact me. Good luck.
Jerry;
I am glad to hear you found something of value at the ASHP Exhibition this year. Thanks for mentioning Pearson Medical Technologies, and specifically our bar code labeling software, m:Print. Most of our hospital customers use m:Print with our clearTag labels to bar code oral syringes and other hard to label/package products. Perhaps we will meet again at another ASHP event in the future. If you or any of your readers would like a demo, please contact me at sales@pearsonmedical.com or simply go to our website, pearsonmedical.com (btw: the link in your blog does not work.)
Hi Opal,
Thanks for the information and for the mention of the broken link. It should work now.