Unless you’ve been comatose for a while, you’ve certainly heard about the Apple iPad. The device has already been crowned the de facto device for everything from e-reading to creating a new wave in healthcare unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Of course this is all speculation as the device hasn’t been officially released yet. Many [...]
The DoseEdge Pharmacy Workflow Manager, formerly IntelliFlowRx Workload Management Software by Baxa, is a system designed to track and manage intravenous (IV) medication dosages prepared by pharmacy personnel in a clean room environment. The system is touted as “The world’s first and only fully integrated workflow manager for the IV room.” The system is designed [...]
Part of the process of implementing barcode medication administration (BCMA) is evaluating hardware; mostly scanners. There are several makers of barcode scanners including Honeywell, Symbol, Metrologic, Datalogic and Code Corp. Having so many choices always makes the selection process interesting. One suggestion from several hospitals I spoke with that were already live with BCMA, was [...]
Over the weekend I spent a little time looking at trends in pharmacy and technology. As expected the healthcare technology market is expanding rapidly and this expansion is creating a need for pharmacists with technology know-how. To prove my point I created a job trends graph from indeed.com using the following search criteria: “pharmacy informatics”, [...]
Our facility is running a trial of DynaMed, “an evidence based medicine point-of-care” database. It reminds me of UpToDate. From the DynaMed site: • According to the National Academy Press (2001) 44-98,000 American deaths per year occur due to preventable medical errors; medical errors are estimated to cost the U.S. $17 to $29 billion annually [...]
One of the best pharmacy jobs I ever had was working for a small compounding pharmacy in the Bay Area of California. Many of the prescription items compounded in this particular pharmacy had to be flavored based on the needs of the patient; sometimes animal, sometimes human. Regardless, the art of flavoring was always a [...]
Software as a service (SaaS) has recently been popping up in healthcare related news, from Fujitsu’s SaaS solution for drug trials to the host of web-based applications from Pharmacy OnceSource. SaaS is different than the traditional enterprise software model because the provider of the software licenses it to the customer as an on-demand service. The [...]
A friend from Talyst stopped by the pharmacy and spent the greater part of Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning taking a look at what it means to work in an acute care hospital pharmacy. We have several pieces of Talyst automation and technology in our pharmacy and he was interested in how we used it [...]
The National Library of Medicine has a website know as Pillbox beta that allows anyone to use various identifiers on a tablet or capsule, i.e. imprint, shape, color, size and/or scoring, to quickly identify a medication. I’ve used systems like this many times for the emergency department when a patient would roll in the door [...]
