How to make a profession vanish into thin air

magicThere appears to be a push in the pharmacy world to expand residency programs so “that, by 2020, postgraduate year 1 (PGY1) residency training should be required for entry into practice for all pharmacists who will serve in direct patient care roles.” This according to a recent article in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy. In addition the article states that “ASHP conducted a survey to determine if health systems were requiring specialized residency training—now known as postgraduate year 2 (PGY2) residency training—for clinical specialist positions10; 15% of the respondents indicated that such specialized training was required, and 67% indicated that a lesser-trained pharmacist would be hired to fill a clinical specialist position only if a candidate with specialized training could not be found.”  Basically acute care pharmacies are looking for pharmacists with more education instead of looking for good pharmacists.

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EHRs may not be the panacea many are hoping for

Selected excerpts from post-gazette.com article: More and more studies are questioning the efficacy of electronic health records, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has begun collecting reports involving electronic health and IT errors, some of which have resulted in death… “The thing about these systems is that it doesn’t really look like they’re getting … Read more

Cool Pharmacy Technology–Rowa Vmax

I became aware of Rowa Vmax a few weeks ago when I read an article about CareFusion purchasing the small German-based company.

From the Rowa brochure:

The Vmax Hospital from Rowa provides hospital pharmacists with an extremely flexible and high performance storage and dispensing system. When combined with the wide range of product options (almost) any thing is possible:

  • High level of scalability in terms of capacity and speed
  • Input speed per machine: up to 900 packs per hour
  • Output speed per machine: up to 2,000 packs per hour
  • Safety features: UPS, backup storage drive, stock scan, user identification with various permissions, refrigerator with data logger
  • Recording of expiry dates and batch numbers
  • Conveyor system: for optimised stock picking and commissioning for the wards

Combined with perfect integration into the hospital’s stock control system the result is clear, streamlined medicines management.

Stock intake, recording, storage and order picking for the wards: all of these previously manual activities can be done with Rowa in a fraction of the time normally required. Qualified personnel can now do qualified work, on the wards for example. This is a huge advantage, especially in times of increasing pressure on hospital staff budgets.

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Patients still not diggin’ the idea of an EHR

EHR outlook: “Patients are still worried about how secure their data will be when stored in an EHR systems, a new study suggests. Xerox Corporation found that of 2,720 poll respondents: 80% were concerned with stolen personal information 64% were concerned with lost, damaged or corrupted files 62% were concerned with the misuse of information” I’m … Read more