Technology in the IV room – its time has come

The cleanroom environment, a.k.a. the IV room, is one of my favorite areas inside an acute care pharmacy. It is often alive with activity, and can often be the busiest area of the pharmacy. It is also a unique place since the use of intravenous (IV) medications is vital to the successful outcomes of patients, but at the same time can result in some of the most egregious errors in healthcare. While the IV compounding process is under tight control as demanded by USP guidelines, the method of preparation and distribution is decidedly more conventional, i.e. IV rooms often rely heavily on humans. It’s an interesting dichotomy found nowhere else in the pharmacy. It is for these reasons that I find it interesting that pharmacy IV rooms have lagged behind other areas of pharmacy operations in automation and technology. However, that’s beginning to change.

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Model for scheduling complex medication regimens

The abstract below caught my attention. I can’t read the entire article because I don’t have a subscription to the journal (a pet peeve of mine – just sayin’). Nonetheless I found the abstract quite interesting. I think the conclusion is a bit overly optimistic, but the use of computers to calculate an optimized medication … Read more

Webinar: Effective Pharmacy Interactions with ‘The C-Suite’

I think a key for the future of pharmacy will be for pharmacy leaders to learn how to engage the C-Suite within their own healthcare system. That makes the content of this webinar from Pharmacy OneSource particularly interesting. Wednesday, December 14th: "Effective Pharmacy Interactions with ‘The C-Suite’" Jim Jorgenson, RPh, MS, FASHP Reserve your Webinar … Read more

Pharmacists impact on osteoporosis management (review article)

Pharmacists are pretty good at helping people with chronic medical conditions manage their medications, hence the term Medication Therapy Managment (MTM). You can find more information about MTM at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) website. Anyway, I came across an article this morning that gives the results of a literature review “to examine the impact … Read more

What do pharmacists want?

pulling_out_hairIt’s a simple question with a simple answer. In today’s pharmacy environment pharmacists want to do more “clinical” activities and distance themselves from the physical pharmacy. See, I told you it was simple.

For the last several months I’ve been listening to people tell me what pharmacists, and pharmacies, want. I find it interesting that most of the opinions differ from mine. No big deal as opinions are opinions, remember? But today I had a brief, albeit passionate discussion over what pharmacists want. The people telling me what pharmacists wanted weren’t healthcare professionals. They were engineers, sales people, etc. I know that comes off a bit elitist, but it’s not. I don’t pretend to know what an engineer knows, so perhaps they shouldn’t pretend to know what I know. Fair? I think so.

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Why regulatory compliance is killing innovation in healthcare

Anyone that’s worked in healthcare knows about regulatory compliance. If not, then they should because it takes up about 50% of everyone’s time, energy and effort. I understand the theory behind regulations, i.e. protect the patient, but I think most of the time all additional regulations do is is create work for people that are … Read more

Cool Technology for Pharmacy – PharmASSIST OPTIx

ThomasNet News: “PharmASSIST OPTIx enables remote prescription verification by taking a high-resolution image of each prescription’s vial contents and vial label, and automatically displaying them on a designated pharmacist’s workstation. The pharmacist compares these images to the appropriate drug image from a standardized drug database, along with specific prescription details to complete the verification. The … Read more

The weakest link in building a safer medication use model

I’ve just spent four days at the ASHP Summer Meeting in Denver, CO. The meeting offered a nice variety of topics, but seemed to focus on medication safety and informatics more this year than in the past. In fact, this is the first year that ASHP has offered a medication safety tract at one of their meetings.

I avoided the more traditional sessions on therapeutics, choosing instead to focus on the informatics and medication safety sessions. Based on the information presented it was obvious to me that these two disciplines are intimately linked. After all, the idea behind much of the technology we use in healthcare today is to improve patient safety.

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Drug shortages, the self-fulfilling prophecy

It seems that every pharmacy I visit lately has an excess of certain medications bursting from their shelves. It’s a strange thing as discussions involving inventory tend to focus on reduction, not accumulation. I’ve seen boxes of enoxaparin, midazolam and propofol stacked to the ceiling in pharmacies throughout various parts of the country. When I … Read more

Technology and pharmacist impact on medication adherence

mobihealthnews: “According to a recent study by Express Scripts, Americans might be wasting as much as $258 billion annually by not taking their prescribed medications. Missed doses can lead to emergency room visits and doctors’ visits, which could be prevented if medication adherence was improved. The Express Scripts study found that more than half of people who believe they take their medications properly are not, according to a report in USA Today.

A similar study conducted by NEHI found that poor medication adherence results in illnesses and ensuing treatments that cost some $290 billion in unnecessary spending each year, $100 billion of that in avoidable hospitalizations alone.

Two members of Congress recently introduced bills to allow Medicare reimbursement for more patients to sit down with therapists one-on-one and equip patients with pill boxes or text message services that help patients become more adherent, the USA Today report said.

The Toronto University College of Pharmacy conducted a study that found medication therapy saved about $93.78 per patient annually in a study of 23,798 people, USA Today reports.”

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