“What’d I miss?” – Week of November 22nd

Welcome to the Thanksgiving edition of “What’d I Miss?”. Thanksgiving is a wonderful time that marks the beginning of my favorite time of the year. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump until the New Year.  Squeeze Christmas in there and you have the best 6 week span of the year. Good times, good times.

As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.

– The Twilight Saga: New Moon was #1 at the box office last weekend. No surprise there, my daughters have already seen it twice. While in Las Vegas this week my family and I took the time to go see Disney’s A Christmas Carol. I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

– Life in the Fast Lane has a great blog on Social Media and Healthcare. It’s interesting to me how popular social networking has become among healthcare providers. I believe it will continue to evolve into something we have yet to consider, especially as more and more hospitals like mine find new ways to deprive people access to these incredbly valuable tools.

– Would you like to learn CPR from your iPhone? Well, now you can with PocketCPR. “PocketCPR for iPhone â„¢ provides REAL-TIME feedback and instructions on CPR that empowers ANYONE to learn and practice CPR.” Watch the demo, it’s interesting.

– Microsoft continues to develop their presence in the healthcare industry with Health Tech Today, their monthly onlince video series. It’s kind of neat.

– I saw a post today on how to have a Vegan Thanskgiving. I believe that classifies as blasphenmy.

– I’ve been looking for a new, small slate model tablet with an 8-10 inch screen. There are several to chose from and the Cool Rui X9 with Windows 7 is definitely on my list of possibles. The X9 offers a 10.2” touch screen, 1GB or RAM, a 160GB hard drive and an Intel Atom N270 processor.

– Amazon announced an update for their Kindle e-reader that offers native PDF support and extends battery life.

– I continue to play with Google Wave as I think it may provide a practical platform for pharmacists across the country to collaborate on various projects. My brother and I spent some time after Thanksgiving luch discussing Wave and his general disinterest in the application. He doesn’t see a use for it. I had difficulty arguing my case as I haven’t spent much time using it. For those of you interested in the possible uses for Wave, I encourage you to read  “5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases” at Mashable.

– Have you seen the new AT&T commercial that says you can surf the web and talk on their network at the same time, but not on Verizon’s? Well, that’s a complete load of crap. I can’t testify to what AT&T and the iPhone can do, but yesterday I had two phone calls going at once on my Droid, one active and one on hold, while I was checking Google Maps for the closest Starbucks; all at the same time. It just makes me hate AT&T all the more.

– The Annals of Pharmacotherapy (Vol. 43, No. 12, pp. 1964-1971): “Propylene Glycol Accumulation in Critically Ill Patients Receiving Continuous Intravenous Lorazepam Infusions – The continuous infusion rate and cumulative 24-hour lorazepam dose are strongly associated with and independently predict propylene glycol concentrations. Despite the absence of confirmed propylene glycol–associated adverse effects, clinicians should be aware that propylene glycol accumulation may occur with continuous-infusion lorazepam.” – Lorazepam infusions are very common in the ICU setting and are a very effecting method of sedation. The important thing to take away from the article is the lack of adverse effects associated with propylene glycol levels. In other words, it’s not time to change your clinical practice just yet.

– The Baltimore Sun: “As things stand now, the pharmaceutical companies that make those prescription drugs are also looking over the doctor’s shoulder, keeping track of how many prescriptions for whose drugs the individual physician is writing. And that data on the prescribing habits of thousands of doctors has become a powerful sales and marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry, but also a source of growing concern among some elected officials, healthcare advocates and legal authorities” – It’s an interesting article, you should read it.

– The Android OS is gaining popularity for use on smartbooks/netbooks. I’d like to spend some time with one.

– Lexi-Comp is beta testing their comprehensive drug databases for the Android OS. I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the beta testers, which was quite exciting. On the downside, I quickly found that their beta version won’t store information to my microSD card making it virtually useless. The Lexi-Comp databases are rather large and quickly overtook the internal memory on my Droid. Lexi-Comp hopes to have the issue resolved shortly. I’ll keep you posted.

– Top searchphrases that brought people to my sight this week: “new lcd technology”,” ipod apps pharmacist”, “wireless medication tracking”, “pharmacy apps for itouch”, “siemens pharmacy short cuts”.

Have a great weekend everyone.