Month: February 2012

Shareable Ink plus EHR equals interesting alternative

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EMR Daily News: “Shareable Ink®, an enterprise cloud computing company that transforms paper documentation to structured data, today announced three new partnerships with leading EHR vendors that will further the company’s reach in delivering a reliable, portable and easy to implement electronic data capture solution that works with existing physician workflows. The agreements with Greenway … Read more

Failure to use “low concentration” alerts properly leads to errors [ISMP Safety Alert]

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When I read the headline in the most recent ISMP Medication Safety Alert! – Smart pump custom concentrations without hard “low concentration” alerts – I didn’t really get it. So what if a smart pump doesn’t stop you from programming “low concentrations”? Well after reading through the article, and the examples, it made perfect sense. … Read more

#HIMSS12 Day 3

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Actually Day 3 was yesterday, but I’m just now getting around to putting some thoughts on paper. Best session I attended was Care Coordination in Practice: Managing Data Volume and Data Reconciliation. The presentation was all about big data and how we’re failing to use it appropriately in healthcare. The slide deck was great. It’s … Read more

#HIMSS12 Day 2

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Today was the first real day of action for me at HIMSS12. I attended a couple of sessions and spent some time in the exhibitor area. The education sessions I attended were pretty vanilla. The most interesting of them was the first one I sat in on called “Got Smartphones? Leveraging Physician’s Smartphone Usage in … Read more

#HIMSS12 Day 1

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The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference & Exhibition, i.e. HIMSS12, started today in Las Vegas. Actually a lot of pre-conference stuff started today. I didn’t do much besides get situated, print my registration badge, figure out where everything was, visit the HIMSS bookstore and Social Media Pavilion, etc. The real action for … Read more

“What’d I miss?” – Week of February February 12, 2011

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I haven’t done one of these in quite a while, but thought I’d try to get back in the groove. It’s been a pretty good week, and as usual there were a lot of things that happened during that time. Not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some … Read more

Pharmaceuticals from crab shells

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This is pretty cool stuff. Vienna University of Technology: “Fungi with additional foreign genes have been created at the Vienna University of Technology. They can now turn chitin into pharmaceuticals. Usually, mould fungi are nothing to cheer about – but now they can be used as “chemical factories”. Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology … Read more

ADR death statistics for the US, 1999-2006 [article]

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Here’s an interesting article from the February 2012 issue of The Annals of Pharmacotherpy [Adverse Drug Reaction Deaths Reported in United States Vital Statistics, 1999-2006].1 The most commonly involved drug classes are no big surprise, but it was interesting to note that the incidence of ADR death changed with age, race, and urbanization. I suppose the … Read more

We’re asking the wrong questions

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thoughtful_monkeyA 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

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