There’s an interesting article at InformationWeek about healthcare and the cloud. The article talks a little bit about the concerns surrounding security in the cloud and what I believe is an undeserved fear of using cloud based services and storage for healthcare information. In the article a pediatrician that is also director of clinical informatics [...]

I’ve mentioned this before several times on this blog, but feel like I have to say it yet again; we need to start standardizing certain things about health information technology. The lack of standardization reared its ugly head at me again last week when our Pyxis med stations kept dropping medications off of patient’s active [...]

During a web browsing session the other day I came across a very interesting blog post by Louis Gray titled “The Future: Operating System And Application-Neutral Data”. I enjoy reading Louis’ posts because I think he has a great vision for the future of personal computing, data, and “the cloud” The blog speaks specifically to [...]

Pandora Data Systems (PDS) is a company that, in the past, has designed software solutions to take information from automated dispensing cabinets (ADCs) like Pyxis, store it, manipulated it, run queries against it and produce reports that allow pharmacy departments to view medication usage trends; including trends to identify diversion.PDS now appears to be expanding [...]

The decentralized pharmacy model brings with it the opportunity for pharmacists to be an integral part of the medical team. This includes following teams of healthcare provides, physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, etc, on morning rounds. And like all good little pharmacists we like to be prepared with as much information as possible about the patient. [...]

ByteandSwitch:” One of the great theoretical advantages of cloud computing is the implied portability – users can move data in and among cloud resources easily, and the cloud itself may move data between and among resources without the customer being aware that anything has changed. In practice, cloud data can prove just as firmly rooted [...]

Informationweek.com: “The rollout of e-prescription, digital medical record and other clinical systems by healthcare providers is undoubtedly creating gigantic new mountains of data. The next big challenges for healthcare is in using that data to make better clinical decisions and save costs, and becoming more proactive in helping patients avoid imminent medical problems. ”It’s estimated that [...]

This time of year always comes with a lot of requests for medication usage data from the Pharmacy Clinical Coordinator. This year has been no exception. The most recent request was for a report identifying all medications in the pharmacy drug master that were used less than ten times in 2008. Seemed simple enough. Right.