I love the Yanko Design website. It has so many cool concepts. Recently while browsing the site I cam across the Grabit, “a door handle fitted with a fingerprint scanner” (image to the right). I immediately thought of pharmacy. It would be cool to see one of these attached to all the refrigerators in the pharmacy. Anytime you wanted to get something out of the fridge you’d simply place your thumb on the fingerprint scanner as you grabbed the handle to open the door. The Grabit handle would register your fingerprint and identify you as someone that had access. And if not, you wouldn’t be able to get in. This would work well for high dollar items that you wanted to track or controlled substances that require refrigeration.
Read more …
Thinking about pharmacy refrigerators
Cool Pharmacy Tech – Phocus Rx
Ever heard of Phocus Rx? Neither had I until a couple of days ago when my boss sent me a link to this story about Children’s Hospital Los Angeles receiving Phocus Rx as a charitable donation.
Phocus Rx is camera system used in pharmacy clean rooms to document and validate the IV compounding process. It consists of two compact 5 megapixel cameras mounted outside the hood in the clean room ceiling or on articulated arm and workflow management software. That’s quite a departure from the other systems I’ve seen where the camera sits in the hood. In addition Phocus Rx includes the obligatory image capture that allows pharmacists to remotely review the compounding process. Pretty cool stuff.
By my count we now have four of these systems on the market, including PHOCUS Rx. Getting pretty crowded in there. Although I have to say that DoseEdge is far and away the most talked about of the IV workflow management systems on the market today. I’d love to play with them side by side to compare features and functionality.
The other systems that I’m aware of include:
- DoseEdge by Baxa (previously mentioned by me here in February 2010)
- Pharm-Q In The Hood (ITH) System by Envision Telepharmacy
- ScriptPro SP Central Telepharmacy System
From the PHOCUS Rx website:
PHOCUS Rx is a powerful camera verification system combining hardware and software. It enables pharmacists and technicians to remotely document and validate the preparation of IV drugs. Two ultra compact 5 megapixel cameras are located outside the hood in the clean room ceiling or on articulated arm. Bi-directional communication software enables pharmacists to review high resolution images and validate or send a warning message.
FEATURES
- scalable and modular system
- non invasive – no wires or devices in hood
- server located outside compounding area
- validate and store images
- barcode recognition
- based on client/server structure
- simple workflow screens
- historical and activity reports
We’re asking the wrong questions
A couple of weeks ago I spent the morning with a friend of mine. He also happens to be a pharmacist and the director of a pharmacy IT group for a medium-sized healthcare system. As one might imagine we have similar interests, which means we spend most of our time together talking about pharmacy; where we’ve been, where we’re going, how to make it better, and so on. We both think that pharmacy is moving at a glacial pace when it comes to making important changes and any real change will likely occur long after we’re both retired.
One thing that occurred to us during the conversation was that we always seem to ask the same questions, which always results in the same answers.
- How do make a process faster [to free up pharmacist's time]?
- How do we make a process more efficient [to free up pharmacist's time]?
- How do we make a process better [to free up pharmacist's time]?
- Etcetera
Cool Pharmacy Technology – ZiuZ Inspector
The ZiuZ Inspector – or is it the Foresee Inspector – is an interesting system designed to inspect the contents of unit dose packages produced by high-speed unit dose packagers. I don’t think there’s much need for this in most acute care pharmacy operations here in the U.S. because we don’t unit dose enough tablets and/or capsules to make it worth while, but I do think it may have potential in some long-term care pharmacies using a central dispensing model. Who knows, that’s not really my area of expertise.
Read more …
Cool Pharmacy Technology – Eyecon Pill Counter
- Scan the bottle
- Pour the tablets onto the Eyecon Pill Counter counting platter. The Eyecon Pill Counter uses “Machine vision technology” to count the tablets.
- Package the tablets
That’s pretty simple. Sure beats the heck out of counting the tablets by hand. 5…10…15…20….
More information on the Eyecon Pill Counter can be found here.
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.
Cool Pharmacy Technology–DAP Personal Med Manager
I came across the HealthOneMed Dispense-A-Pill (DAP) Personal Medication Manager while surfing the ‘net one afternoon earlier this week. It’s basically a miniature ADU with pie-shaped wedge slots for personal medications. I thought it was pretty slick.
MedVantx launches medication adherence program
MedVantx, Inc., has announced the deployment of its patent pending Patient Profile™ patient medication and adherence reporting engine across its network of 3,600 high prescribing primary care providers participating in the Company’s integrated program of initial free medication therapy, adherence management and home delivery program. This new program utilizes the Company’s proprietary automated ATM like sample management system (“MedStart™“) and an integrated secure web reporting portal to provide physicians visibility to their patients’ adherence to chronic medication therapy…
The MedStart™ system automates the traditional sampling process for the physician; captures physician sampling data for inclusion in the patients’ claims history medical record and provides consumers access to highly relevant drug and disease state educational materials. Since patients don’t always get prescriptions filled, physicians can enhance adherence by providing their patients with initial therapy and better informational tools to manage their conditions right from the office…
Now with the availability of the MedVantx Patient Profile™, physicians are able to view data about how patients, on an individual basis, are complying with their prescribed medication treatments. By showing exactly when a patient fills prescriptions, physicians can detect late refills, gaps in medication fulfillment, discontinued treatments and more to accurately access and improve patient compliance.
Interesting concept. I often wonder if simply getting rid of chain and grocery store pharmacies, and going back to neighborhood community practices would be the best way to improve patient medication compliance. I’ve worked in chain, grocery store and community pharmacies and have always felt that the small community practice knows their patients best and provides the best patient care when it comes to medication management. Something to think about anyway.
More on the system mentioned above can be found at the MedVantx website.
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 schedule for individual patients is a promising idea. (Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2011 Dec;104(3):514-9. Epub 2011 Oct 5.)
Abstract
Medication adherence tends to affect the recovery of patients. Patients having poor medication adherence show a worsening of their condition and/or increased complications. Unfortunately, between 20% and 50% of chronic patients are unable to manage their medications. This study proposes a model to improve the patients’ medication compliance by reducing medication frequency.Published studies have shown that, based on the patients’ lifestyle, simplification of the medication frequency and remodeling of the medication schedule is able to help improve medication adherence. Therefore, this study tried to simplify medication frequency by combining therapies. Moreover, by adjusting according to lifestyle, the study also tries to remodel medication timing in relation to mealtimes to create personal medication schedules.
In this study, we used 19,393,452 outpatient prescriptions from the National Health Insurance Research Database to verify our system (algorithm optimized). At the same time, we examined the differences between the frequency summarized by general public and experts’ advice medication behavior. Compared with the experts’ advice method, this system has reduced the medication frequency in about 49% of prescriptions.
Using combined medication to simplify medication frequency is able to reduce the medication frequency significantly and improve medication adherence. Furthermore, this should also improve patient recovery, reduce drug hazards and result in less drug wastage.
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 verifying pharmacist can be stationed anywhere – in the front of the pharmacy counseling patients or offsite at another pharmacy, a central processing center, or working from a home office. PharmASSIST OPTIx stores each prescription’s images as part of the patient history record, enabling pharmacies to quickly retrieve them for pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) audits and to confirm the quantity dispensed.
Pharmacies can use PharmASSIST OPTIx in stand-alone mode or integrated with Innovation’s PharmASSIST Symphony® workflow systems, which enables end-to-end prescription tracking, problem management, and reporting. In addition to processing a pharmacy’s countable medications, PharmASSIST OPTIx handles all non-countable products (e.g., ointments/creams, liquids, syringes, inhalers, etc.) for prescription filling and remote verification. The system can also assist pharmacies with physical inventory control.”
It reminds me of a non-cleanroom version of DoseEdge.
Additional automation is needed for it to be a real game changer, but it’s still pretty cool technology. It would be slick if the person filling the prescription never had to touch the product and the end result could be remotely verified.
Product website here.
OPTIx brochure (PDF).
