Tag: Pharmacy Informatics

The ASHP Summer Meeting 2011 continues … (#ashpsm)

ASHP 2011 Summer Meeting and Exhibition

I had planned on blogging daily during the Summer Meeting, but obviously that didn’t happen. Perhaps it was the big dinner I had yesterday evening followed by the insanely good gelato that put me into a food comma, or then again maybe it was just laziness. Regardless, I skipped a day.

The Summer Meeting continues to roll on with some great sessions and lots of interesting conversation. All-in-all between yesterday and today I’ve attended the following:

Continue reading The ASHP Summer Meeting 2011 continues … (#ashpsm)

The next big thing in pharmacy informatics? Hint: IDK

RxInformatics: “The following was a list serv question from Monica Puebla, PharmD, MBA, BCPS for a HIS course. Here is my response to the Question. I would add State Boards of Pharmacy to the list of those to present this as well.

“If you were given the opportunity to present to your DOP, VP and CFO a project that you deem would have the greatest impact on the pharmacy department as well as the health-system in general from any point of view, clinical, financial, operational, without regards to costs, what would it be?””

John’s response was to “Study under what circumstances pharmacist order review (perfection) could be taken over by automated clinical decision support while increasing quality and safety” in addition to including a nice list of references related to ‘perfection’ (listed at the bottom of this post). I highly recommend looking at the references John provides because they’re informative and enlightening. You can also read more about the ‘perfection’ idea at one of John’s older posts here. It’s amazing that this discussion has been going on for well over a year and to the best of my knowledge has yet to make much headway.
Continue reading The next big thing in pharmacy informatics? Hint: IDK

#ASHPMidyear 2010 part deux

Today was a great day to be at ASHP Midyear 2010. Things really got going as the sessions were kicked into high gear and the exhibit hall officially opened.

I spent the day tracking down pharmacy automation and technology. Did you really expect me to do anything else? I don’t ever recall being as excited as a clinician as I am being an informatics pharmacist. Anyway, here are some things I found interesting:
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Oh yeah, on my way to #ASHPMidyear 2010

Here I sit in the airport waiting for my flight to take me to ASHP Midyear 2010 in Anaheim, CA.  ASHP Midyear is the premiere conference/meeting for pharmacists each year. Sure there are larger healthcare conferences/meetings every year, but none are dedicated entirely to the pharmacy profession.

As this is only my second ASHP Midyear in my career I’m excited to see if the experience matches that of last year. I’m sure it will as I continue to be impressed by the number and variety of sessions crammed into such a short period of time. Of course I’m particularly interested in the informatics sessions, but it’s ok if you find yourself sitting in on one of the talks updating you on what’s happening in the clinical world. I won’t hold it against you.

The week for me will kick off on Sunday morning with the Talyst Users Group meeting followed by a session on RFP’s and contracts put on by the ASHP Section of Pharmacy Informatics and Technology’s Advisory Group on Pharmacy Operations Automation. I’ll round out Sunday’s activities by attending the McKesson Safe Compounding Reception. And it will only get better from there as the week will be filled with sessions on clinical decision support, barcoding, telepharmacy, the application of social media to pharmacy, and so on and so forth.  My week will conclude with the session titled mHealth: There’s an App for That where I will be presenting information on the integration of the iPad into pharmacy services.

The information I’m presenting was pretty cutting edge at the time I submitted the slides, but is now clearly dated. That’s the downside of having to submit presentation slides so far in advance. Anyway, it should still be worth the time and effort. I’ve always found it educational for myself to present information to people as someone always has something interesting to add or a good question to stimulate the thought process.

I’m looking forward to the next five days. I’ll be Tweeting (@jfahrni) as much of the event as possible in addition to posting about the day’s activities whenever feasible. I hope to see you there. If you’d like to get together and talk a little pharmacy informatics/automation don’t hesitate to give me a Buzz, Tweet or email.

Who’s to blame for the lack of advancement in pharmacy automation and technology?

Without question there is a lack of advanced automation and technology in the acute care pharmacy setting. Spend some time in several acute care pharmacies if you don’t believe me. There’s clearly a need for it, but it’s just not being used.

I am a fan of automation and technology in any setting, but especially in the acute care pharmacy. I believe that the continued use, development and advancement of pharmacy technology should be a key component of any plan to change the current pharmacy practice model. Unfortunately, the situation is problematic because current pharmacy technology is either poorly designed for the needs of the pharmacy or the pharmacy in which it is used has a poorly designed workflow that doesn’t take advantage of it. Why is that? Who’s to blame; someone, anyone, no one? Valid questions.
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Pharmacovigilance, what’s in a name

I read an interesting discussion about pharmacovigilance (PV) software a few weeks ago on one of the pharmacy listservs I belong to. The conversation struck me as odd because much of it sounded an awful lot like a discussion on clinical decision support (CDS). This led me to wonder whether or not PV and CDS are the same thing, completely different or subsets of one another. I am not familiar with the term PV myself, so I set out to gather some information. And here’s what I found.
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Update: Siemens Innovations 2010 Presentation

Today was the big day. I gave my presentation at about 11:00 am and it cleared the room. There were about 100 attendees for the CPOE presentation just prior to mine and about 90 of those people got up and left when it came time for me to do my thing. I guess mobile pharmacy just isn’t interesting to most people.

Anyway, the presentation is below. There is an embedded video near the end that didn’t pull into SlideShare. It’s about a 30 second look at how we use Citrix on the iPad to access various clinical applications. I attempted to upload in to YouTube, but kept getting an error. I’ll try again later. If you want to see the elongated version of the videos simply go to YouTube and type in “Kaweah Delata iPad“, or something similar, and several options will pop up.

Siemens Innovations ’10 here I come

I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight. I’m on my way to Orlando for Innovations ’10 for Healthcare IT. Innovations is an annual conference put on by Siemens, who promote themselves as “ a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, and operates in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors.” The hospital where I work uses several products from Siemens including Siemens Pharmacy, Siemens Medication Administration Check (MKA) and Soarian, which is their clinical information system for physicians and nurses, and the foundation for their CPOE system.
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Slow progress in pharmacy automation and stale technology creates ho-hum interest

Recently I’ve been in bit of a blogging slump. The world of technology suddenly appears a little less exciting. In fact, I find myself thinking of current technology as boring. I read lots of blog posts and articles that refer to new technologies as “revolutionary”, but I haven’t seen much revolutionary technology lately. In fact, most of the new technology is simply an iteration of the same theme; or worse, recycling of an old theme.

Consumer technology is clearly ahead of healthcare with the exception of scanning devices like MRIs, which are pretty cool when you stop to think about what they do. However, some of the most recently vaunted consumer technologies are devices aimed at information consumption like the iPad or devices designed to access data and social media while on the go, i.e. the new crop of smartphones. It’s not really new technology per se, but rather a new application of already available technology.
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Quick Hit – CPOE, a pharmacist’s time and laughter

We’ve finally stepped off the curb and are moving full speed ahead with our CPOE implementation. As a result I spent quite a bit of time last week with our Siemens assigned CPOE consultant. He’s a pharmacist which makes things nice because we understand each other and speak the same language.

The goal of one of the meetings I attended last week was to discuss the resources necessary to implement a CPOE system. Needless to say the project is going to be resource heavy. When it came time to tease out the IT pharmacist part of the project I was a little surprised at what I heard. The time requirements weren’t surprising – several hundred hours – but where the pharmacist fits into the entire scheme was.
Continue reading Quick Hit – CPOE, a pharmacist’s time and laughter