Construction on pharmacy cleanrooms is at an all-time high in California. Every hospital I know is either renovating a sterile compounding area — Â cleanroom or SCA — or building a new one. Why? Because of USP General Chapter <800>, of course. Never have I seen so little cost so much. That little 19-page document has … Read more
The Evolve line of compressor-free, medical grade refrigerators* are quite impressive. Powered by SilverCoreâ„¢ Technology, they have no compressor. And because they have no compressor, they have no mechanical parts, run quiet, use less electricity, and generate less heat. The system “absorbs heat energy from the storage cabinet using a non-toxic, non-hazardous refrigerant embedded in the walls. … Read more
The Intelliguard® Linked Visibility Inventory Systemâ„¢, or LVIS for short, is an RFID-enabled anesthesia cart designed for use by anesthesiology providers in the OR. I spoke about this briefly in my last podcast. LVIS is a free-standing cart with three drawers – one large and two small. The cart looks quite different from any of … Read more
Needle sticks happen. I’ve actually stuck myself a few times during my career while compounding in the IV room. Fortunately for me, it never involved anything hazardous. Still, it was a pain. No pun intended. Over the years a lot of attention has been given to methods for preventing needle sticks in healthcare, ranging from things … Read more
Not being involved with long-term care (LTC) pharmacies much over the years, I sometimes forget that there’s technology to help with some of the day-to-day operations. I recently came across an advertisement for a company called Manchac Technologies. The reason it caught my eye is because I had a chance to visit with Manchac several … Read more
Acute care pharmacies generate a lot of pharmaceutical waste, and it’s not always clear what you should do with it. Yesterday I came across The Cactus Smart Sink while roaming through the exhibit hall at ASHP Midyear. The Smart Sink is a pharmaceutical waste disposal container that renders its contents “unrecoverable, non-retrievable and unusable”. Some key features … Read more
Vestigo is web-based Investigational Drug Service (IDS) software made by the McCreadie Group, Inc., a privately held pharmacy software company out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The McCredie Group is a small boutique company that builds software for niche markets like IDS. I’ve worked in pharmacies that have an IDS, and let me just say that … Read more
The Vaccine Smart-Fridge is an interesting concept for ambulatory care. It appears to be a consignment vaccine distribution system. Reminds me of a refrigerated single-point automated dispensing cabinet (ADC). There’s a lot to like here. By using a consignment model, the vendor offers an ambulatory care clinic low cost, low risk access to vaccines. It … Read more
Not exactly pharmacy technology. However, SMART-IV involves integration of iv infusions with bar code scanning at the patient bedside. That’s kind of pharmacy related, in a sort of roundabout way.
Check the video below for a look at how the system works. The commentary is in Dutch, so if you don’t speak Dutch you might be in trouble. Regardless, you’ll get the basic idea anyway.
This was all over the web yesterday, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but this is huge. 3D printing is one of those technologies that has the potential to disrupt just about every industry it touches. It’s not often that you can say that. The most recent technologies that I can think of that had that kind of impact was the explosion of smartphones and tablets, which are now ubiquitous across every industry you can imagine.
