- Avatar was #1 at the box office last weekend. My family and I saw it on Saturday night (12/19) and it was great. If you plan on seeing it, make sure you do it on the big screen.

- John Poikonen posted a quick blog about PharmaSURVEYOR, which is an online drug side effect analyzer. It’s an interesting concept, but as John warns “It is a bit alarmist in nature, so I would be worried about over interpretation of the results.” For example, I entered Prilosec OTC and Tylenol and it gave me a life threatening risk of agranulocytosis. While theoretically possible, I suppose, I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

- HIT Consultant: “Ontario’s privacy commissioner has launched an investigation after a USB drive containing the personal health information of more than 80,000 people, who went to flu clinics in Durham Region — just north of Toronto — went missing.” – Ooops! This is why you don’t store confidential information on any type of “local” device; another good reason why cloud storage is appealing. I realize people worry about cloud breaches, but at least the cloud won’t fall out of your pocket.

- KLAS has listed their best in software awards. The best software for pharmacy was identified as Epic Willow. Bummer, we don’t use Epic.

- I’m a big fan of RFID technology, which made this post at Engadget very interesting. Check out the “Rfiddler” gun that disables RFID tags. Looks like fun.

- UMPC Portal: “There are huge physical and software issues for tablet PC designers to overcome and through our experience with UMPCs over the last 3 years it’s easy to see that the Archos 9 doesn’t really solve them. The problem for the Archos 9 however is that it neither hits the mark as a consumer tablet or as a niche ultra-mobile productivity device for UMPC fans. It’s too heavy and too slow, doesn’t shine as a media player due to lack of storage, software and online media support. It doesn’t shine as a productivity device due to the lack of keyboard and doesn’t shine as a mobility device due to weight and lack of 3G.” – This is an unfortunate development as I was very excited about the Archos 9 tablet. It was on my list of must-haves until I read the review. Hey look at the bright side that means I still have an open slot on my must-haves list.

- Based on the review of the Archos 9 tablet my next best hope may be the JooJoo. Engadget has photos and a video of the JooJoo. It’s a great concept, I only hope the application is as good.

- ComputerWorld: “Mike Elgan: Hello, tablets. Good-bye, netbooks! Seven trends are conspiring to usher in a tsunami of tablets — and sink netbooks.” – While I like what Mike has to say about tablet PCs, I don’t see netbooks dying out any time soon. We just purchased a netbook for my youngest daughter and I love it. Err, I mean she loves it. They’re light, equipped to handle internet surfing and inexpensive. You can even get the best of both worlds with the Eee PC T91. Don’t count netbooks out just yet.

- FierceMobileHealthcare: “Yes, PHR usage is minimal; approximately 3 percent of Americans actually use one, according to Forrester Research. But that hasn’t discouraged numerous companies from developing PHRs, particularly for mobile phones. The smart ones are targeting their products to patients with chronic conditions.” – The healthcare industry wants people to start using PHRs for various reasons, but healthcare has to develop a standardized EHR first. The development of PHRs is much more likely if you were to walk into your physicians office and handed a link, user name and password to your medical records. PHRs should be like a blood pressure cuff; there are many models, but they all basically work the same.

- GottaBeMobile.com: “For touch users, I’d like to see Microsoft’s left hand quit foiling what its right hand wants to do by either getting rid of Windows 7 Starter Edition, or include the Touch and Pen bits relegated to Starter Edition.” – Amen. I never understood why you would build something so robust and then cripple it.

- FT.com/techblog: “Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment. Speculation that Apple is preparing to introduce a new tablet style computer has been building all year, and other reports now suggest the tablet will make its debut in January.” – I never thought I’d say this, but I’m getting a little sick and tired of Apple. They’re playing dirty little games that are quite frankly, beneath them. They leak rumors about their tablet all year long, wait until everyone has purchased their Apple Christmas gifts, and then announce their tablet; not very nice. I think I’m going to re-dedicate myself to other platforms. With Android finally taking shape that is a real possibility.

- Check out the concept tablet designs at Yanko Design. Would someone just make these things already!

- The Palmdoc Chronicles: “Imagine if Palm had a WebOS tablet, this would mean that WebOS would be available to anyone who already has a phone and wanted to try out the new platform. They can keep their carrier and current plan. They can download apps from the Palm App Catalog as well as run their existing PalmOS Apps in Classic.” – Palmdoc hits the nail on the head with this post. I’ve wanted this for years; not the necessarily the WebOS of course, but the Palm OS in general. WebOS offers many of the features that are appealing to fans of Android tablets. Too bad it will probably never happen. Anyone interested in building one with me? It must be possible.

- I’ve mentioned this before, but the Microsoft Surface blog has an updated video showing gameplay with D&D on Surface. Incredible, simply incredible.

The top ten searchphrases that brought people to my site this week:

1. meditech 6.0 emr
2. jerry fahrni
3. new lcd technology
4. lexi comp droid
5. jaansun capsule machine
6. lexicomp droid
7. micromedex for droid
8. cloud computing in pharmacy
9. free pharmacy apps for ipod touch
10. medboard medication tracking [tied with] lexi droid

It is interesting to see that five of the top ten searches have to do with smartphones and/or mobile devices, which begs the question, “Are smartphones a viable platform for pharmacy?” I smell a blog post coming on.

Have a great weekend everyone.

The video below is of me playing on the Surface wall. Based on my experience I’ve decided that I need one of these in my house. I have just the spot for it. Now if I could only convince my wife of the same thing.

The caption for the image at right: “Bladder control: Manipulating a magnetic fluid on top of the researchers’ “sensor tile” (top) offers a novel way to control a computer. The interface can be used to sculpt virtual shapes (bottom). Credit: Microsoft”

The Patient’s Doctor:  “Ten reasons why you should use a computer in your practice – Have you ever lost your temper because your patient has lost his medical records, and does not know what medications he is taking? Are you fed up of having to write the same prescription again and again? Aren’t you impressed by other doctors who give their patients crisp, professional word-processed medical summary sheets? How are you going to compete with corporate hospitals who can access their patient’s medical records at the click of a button? The good news is that the same technology is now easily and inexpensively available for you to use in your own clinic! IT can help you improve your documentation and storage; and actually increase your productivity and efficiency, by allowing you easy access instantly to all your patient’s medical records, no matter where you are!” – This post lists 10 reasons why physicians should use computers in their practice. There are some light hearted reasons like ‘look cool’ and ‘impress your patients”, but there are some serious reasons as well like ‘save time’ and ‘increase productivity’.

Magic Scaling Sprinkles: “The Meaning of Information Technolgy – I cannot help but be a technological optimist because technology is mankind’s only bulwark against the barbarism of heaps. But I’ll grant that technology is imperfect; it is sometimes fair to criticize the Tyranny of Technology. The usual argument goes that all these tweets and text messages and notifications that “a software update is available” leave no space quiet, provide no room for contemplation. It is true: we do live in a world of interruptions; interruptions created by information technology. But we should not be surprised by this fact and no more should we despair of it. One generation of technology solves the problems of the previous but causes problems of its own. The next generation of technology repeats this story; a story as old as mankind itself. This is the dialectics of history.” – I found this post to be interesting, well written and thought provoking.

Newsweek: “Wired for Hypocrisy – That’s pretty much the case, according to new research. Since actions cannot be undone, the only option when they conflict with beliefs—which produces the phenomenon called cognitive dissonance—is to alter the beliefs. When people experience cognitive dissonance, it turns out, brain activity causes us to back and fill, mentally. The result is that we change our beliefs so that they are once again aligned with our actions. Although well known in psychology—the idea that people change their attitudes to reduce the psychological pain of cognitive dissonance dates back to the 1950s—the phenomenon has been a mystery neurobiologically. That is, its brain basis has been a black hole. Which makes this first stab at an explanation particularly intriguing: the brain regions involved in resolving cognitive dissonance are so nimble, enabling us to find rationalizations like that of the Hummer-driving green, it’s a wonder anyone can stick to his principles.” – I see this all the time as I drop my children off at school. What we currently see as “normal” disturbs me at times.

The same story from two different sources:  ChannelWeb:  “Report: iPhone E-book Popularity Will Challenge Amazon, B&N – Is Apple (NSDQ:AAPL) the one holding all the aces in the exploding market for e-books and e-readers? Apple doesn’t have a dedicated e-reading device of its own to compete with the likes of Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. But it may not need one when it already has iPhone — and e-reading and e-book applications are seeing levels of popularity on the iPhone like never before.” eWeek: “Apples iPhone Could Become Next Hot E-Reader Says Report – One of the most popular e-reader devices on the market could soon be the iPhone, according to a research note by analytics company Flurry, which observed a marked rise in the number of e-book-related applications available through Apple’s App Store in September and October.” –I just don’t see this happening. The e-reader crowd isn’t about to give up their beautiful eInk devices like the Sony and Kindle. I’ll give you the convenience of the iPhone as an e-reading platform, but would never use it as my primary e-reader. There’s room for all the players in this sandbox.

Swiss MSDN Team Blog: Microsoft Surface – Going below the Surface – This is a great post that shows the unboxing of a Microsoft Surface Computer. Wicked cool! I wish they weren’t so expensive.

PharmacyOneSource: “The Black Hole of Pharmacy – Today Pharmacy OneSource acquired the rights to the solution for “The Pharmacy Black Hole”: MedBoard. MedBoard is a web-based Medication Tracking System that records and tracks preparation and delivery activities of orders throughout a hospital to reduce lost and missing meds that contribute to approximately $400 per bed per year of preventable waste.” – I just posted on this very technology last Friday.

According to the Norrköping website “The technique used in this table is already utilized successfully as a compliment to the conventional autopsy. Apart from avoiding cutting in the body the doctors can see things that are difficult to discover in a conventional autopsy. Furthermore, the technique opens up for new opportunities in countries where autopsies are not accepted due to cultural reasons. The technique can also revolutionize the traditional health care in many areas.”

I sure wish we would have had one of these when I was a pharmacy student at UCSF. For some unknown reason, pharmacy students were forced to take a gross anatomy class. We spent a lot of long nights and weekends cutting up some poor corpse, and all that could have been avoided with a Virtual Autopsy Table. Using this sort of technology might not be ideal for a surgery resident, but it would work just fine for a pharmacy student. Imagine the utility if this technology could be combined with Zebra Imaging’s holograms.

- Gateway is jumping in to the tablet PC game with the EC18T tablet along with Acer and the Aspire Timeline 1810T. With the addition of Gateway, I think every major Windows based computer manufacturer now has a tablet.

- Motion Computing is reportedly upgrading the screens in their C5 and F5 tablets with gorilla glass. Manufactured by Corning, Gorilla Glass is an alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass designed specifically for portable display devices.

- There was an article in The New York Times questioning whether or not the tablet will actually find mainstream acceptance. There’s no question in my mind that they will. This is especially true with new designs like the Microsoft Courier booklet and the mythical Apple tablet. The most recent Apple tablet rumor has it shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2010.

- GottaBeMobile.com has an article titled “Why Tablets Flopped (and How They Can Unflop)” that talks about why tablet PC’s “haven’t taken off yet and how they still can”. It’s quite simple, really. The technology has always appealed to niche markets, mainly the business world. As the devices continue to develop, the market will grow. This is especially true with the emergence of multi-touch and Surface technologies.

- Speaking of touch technology, TechCrunch has a great article on new touch technology and what it means for the future of computing.

- If you want to try something really unique on your tablet pc desktop, then I recommend you take a look at BumpTop. BumpTop is an interactive 3D desktop that has some really incredible features. Check out the video below.

- TabletKiosk is offering multi-touch NetSlate tablets. This is interesting because TabletKiosk was the only real competitor for Motion Computing for slate tablets in the healthcare industry. Now it looks like they may have a slight advantage.

- John Biggs at CrunchGear wrote about “The coming tablet wars”. Besides using some great graphics, John does a nice job of presenting a condensed version of where tablet PCs have been and where they’re headed. Take a look at the Apple Newton photo in the post. The Newton came out in the early 90’s and was one of the most advanced devices of its time. It had a very loyal cult following. Apple made a huge mistake by not continuing to develop the Newton.

- Blogging with “ink” looks interesting. I’ve thought about trying it many times, but I don’t know if I really want people looking at my handwriting. I also think I type faster than I write. Who knows, it may be in my future.

I’m still not sure why tablet PCs haven’t become more popular. Consider this; would you rather have a laptop that could never be used as a tablet PC, or a tablet PC that could be used as a laptop as well as “pen and paper”? That’s what I thought.

My other tablet PC posts can be found here and my thoughts on the application of tablet PCs in pharmacy are summed up in this PDF document.

- The Final Destination was #1 at the box office last weekend followed by Inglourious Basterds.

- Earlier this week John Poikonen at RxInformatics.com posted a very interesting discussion on the use of auto-verification for medication orders entered via CPOE. The nuts and bolts of the discussion center on the approval of certain types of medication orders without a pharmacist review. The idea makes a lot of sense and is a very interesting topic. To understand how this might work take a look at this, also from John.

- mobihealthnews : “Sprint announced a multi-year agreement with M2M [machine-to-machine] company DataSmart to help embedded device makers to bring their products to market sooner. As part of the announcement the carrier quoted Yankee Group’s Vice President of Research Steve Hilton: ”The demand for sophisticated M2M applications that provide data transmission is growing. Specifically, the rapid growth in M2M healthcare, energy and fleet services is fueling the need for faster and easier deployment models.”” – The article also mentions that Verizon Wireless and AT&T have both made similar moves. This looks like great news for healthcare as these companies can leverage their relationships with mobile device developers to improve healthcare technology.

- After only two years in beta it looks like Microsoft’s HealthVault is ready for primetime. HealthVault was launched in October 2007 and is now “available in the production and pre-production environments”, which means Microsoft is removing the beta label from the product. Final release notes are available at the HealthVault blog. I don’t hear much about Google Health anymore. I wonder why that is.

- Check out the touchatag RFID system. The touchatag system is a web-based client that interacts with your PC to perform all kinds of functions. Just get close to the reader and make your PC do pretty much anything you want. Cool.

- Ever heard of healthBase? Neither had I, but it turns out that it is a search engine that aggregates medical content from health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and the Mayo Clinic’s health site. HealthBase uses search technology to read sentences inside documents and understand the meaning. Check out the video of healthBase on YouTube. It looks pretty impressive. I did a couple of cursory searches using some pharmacy/medical terminology and the results I received were accurate. I won’t replace my bookmarks to PubMed, UpToDate, or Lexi-Online just yet, but I’ll certainly add it to the list.

- University of Southampton News: “A hand-held device which could offer point-of-care blood cell analysis in doctors’ surgeries is being developed by University of Southampton researchers led by Professor Hywel Morgan of ECS. The research team, which is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science’s Nano Research Group and involves collaboration with Professor Donna Davies and Dr Judith Holloway of the School of Medicine, has developed a microfluidic single-cell impedance cytometer that performs a white cell differential count. The system, which can identify the three main types of white blood cells – T lymphocytes, monocytes and neutrophils, is faster and cheaper than current methods.” There is an abstract of the device in Lab on a Chip this month. Lab on a Chip is a real journal, seriously.

- You should already know how I feel about tablet PCs and touchscreen technology. Well, there is a great video (inserted below) of the soon to be released Fujitsu multi-touch tablet PC at Gottabemobile. The tablet in the video is very nice, and the screen behaves a lot like an iPhone/iPod touch screen. Watch the video and listen for the word “surface”, and notice how the person performing the demo is able to handle the photos on the screen. This is very impressive technology.

- “Can Opioid Tolerance Be Treated by Increasing the Opioid Dose?” – This is a good question and the pharmacist answering it did a fine job. People are often afraid to treat pain as aggressively as they should. How much “pain medicine” is too much? There’s no such thing as “too much” as long as the patient has pain. You treat the pain until the patient can no longer handle the side effects of the medications or they stop breathing.

- Check out the Nao robot playing with a Microsoft Surface table. It’s just a little bit spooky.

- Windows 7 will be available for purchase October 22. Apparently we already have some copies available in our IT department. I asked for a copy for my new tablet PC and was firmly rejected. It looks like I’ll have to wait until October 22 to purchase my own copy just like everyone else. Bummer.

- Everyone can relax; the NFL regular season begins in less then a week. My Arizona Cardinals open up at home against the SF forty-whiners (i.e. the 49ers). Here’s hoping the Cardinals look better in the regular season then they did in the preseason. They were atrocious.

Have a great weekend everyone.

The author further discusses the likelihood of more and more touchscreen devices, especially notebooks, coming to the market in the near future. Extending the idea a little further, what about the use of touchscreens in healthcare, and more specifically pharmacy? I don’t see the need for touchscreen devices when sitting at a terminal typing your life away, but what about when you’re standing in front of a computer terminal. I always feel a desire to touch a computer screen when I’m standing in front of it, which seems odd because I frequently yell at people for touching my desktop monitors with their grimy little fingers. It must have something to do with ergonomics or perhaps because it’s not always intuitive to grab a mouse while standing.

Our AutoPack machine from Talyst has a touchscreen, but most of the packager’s functionality is controlled by a remote terminal a few feet away. And on the other side of the pharmacy, our automated storage carousel (AutoCarousel) doesn’t have a touchscreen, but I wish it did. I’ve mentioned before that I think this would be a nice option. As I mentioned above, I always feel compelled to reach out and touch the monitor when standing in front of the carousel. It feels like a more natural movement for some reason. The monitor is right in front of my face and it always feels awkward to reach down and grab the mouse. Of course I could use the keyboard to move around, but a simple tap on the screen would be faster. I’ve spoken with one of the Talyst engineers about using a touchscreen on the carousel, and while they have looked into it and feel it could be easily done, I was reminded that the AutoPharm software was not currently optimized for touchscreen operation. Ah and there’s the rub, most software isn’t quite ready for all the new touchscreen technology. While Windows 7 will bring advanced multi-touch capabilities to the operating system, software just isn’t quite ready to take advantage of all that great functionality.

Touchscreens are becoming more and more popular, especially with the increased use of smartphones, UMPCs, and MIDs. Touchscreen navigation on these smaller devices is a must if you hope to make them useful to the user. While a touchscreen isn’t a necessity on larger device yet, it is a welcome luxury. Like most great technological advances, it will take quite some time for touchscreens to filter down into pharmacy, but I think it’ll eventually get here. After all you don’t have to use the touchscreen for navigation, but it sure would be a nice option to have. Imagine entering an order on a CPOE system with nothing more than the tip of your finger. If properly designed, the physician wouldn’t have to type anything. Simply tap a pre-built link with the drug, dose, route and frequency desired and hit “send’.

What about the application of a Microsoft Surface system in the pharmacy that could allow pharmacists to pull up interactive patient information while sitting around a table. Or perhaps the same idea could apply to medical teams, allowing them to perform virtual rounds with every system in the hospital literally at their fingertips. The possible applications for touchscreen technology in pharmacy makes my brain hurt.

What do you think?