Android App: Tarascon Prescriber’s Essentials

I never had much use for the Tarascon Pharmacopoeia, but I got a lot of mileage out of the Johns Hopkins ABX Guide. From Google Play: Tarascon Prescriber’s Essentials The Prescriber’s Essentials Android App is a combination of the award-winning Tarascon Pharmacopoeia and the Johns Hopkins POC-IT Center ABX Guide, now available for your Android device. … Read more

Medication reconciliation on an internal medicine unit in French hospital [Article]

Interesting abstract from Presse Medicale (Paris, France) talking about medication reconciliation on an internal medicine unit in a French hospital. The authors found lots or discrepancies, which isn’t a surprise. They also found that pharmacists could help identify and correct many of the discrepancies, which also isn’t a surprise. Like many other articles I’ve read recently, … Read more

Foiled again!

A couple of months ago I received an email from the ASHP Section of Pharmacy Informatics and Technology (SOPIT). It basically said, “hey dude, you’re a pharmacy informatics guy. You should throw your hat in the ring for a position on the SOPIT Executive Committee.” My initial reaction was to ignore it as these things … Read more

Pharmacy technician program standards draft from ASHP now available for comment

This was part of my ASHP NewsLink today - A draft of the updated, revised “Accreditation Standards for Pharmacy Technician Education and Training Programs” [from ASHP] is now available for comment until September 28. After this date, another draft will be developed and made available for one more round of comments. According to the document “the … Read more

Article: A pharmacist-led information technology intervention for medication errors (PINCER)

From a recent article in The Lancet (The Lancet, Volume 379, Issue 9823, Pages 1310 – 1319, 7 April 2012)

Kind of man versus machine study. Actually, it was more like man plus machine versus machine alone.

The control group practices therefore used simple feedback; after collection of data at baseline, control practices received computerised feedback for patients identified as at risk from potentially hazardous prescripting and inadequate blood-test monitoring of medicines plus brief written educational materials explaining the importance of each type of error. Practices were asked to introduce changes they considered necessary within 12 weeks after the collection of data at baseline. Intervention practices received simple feedback plus a pharmacist-led information technology complex intervention (PINCER) lasting 12 weeks.”

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People are irrational

Two disclaimers:

  1. To be absolutely clear, this is a rant. Sometimes I rant to my wife, other times on paper. This time I felt compelled to throw it up here.
  2. I’m a tablet PC fan, and this is my opinion. If you have an alternate opinion, that’s cool. If you want to talk about tablets with me, by all means let’s talk. I love it when people show me cool things they’ve done with their tablets. But if you want to argue with me about my opinion, fell free to stay away. People that want to counter my opinion with useless drivel tend to do nothing more than make me think less of them than I already do. And trust me when I say that I have a pretty low opinion of most people to start with. Not all people mind you, but many. It’s unfortunate I know, but society in general has done little to change my mind.

Ok, let’s begin ….

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Article: The costs of adverse drug events in community hospitals

The article below appeared in the March 2012 edition of Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety – yes, that’s a real journal. I couldn’t make this stuff up – Anyway, there’s nothing new here, we all know that ADEs are expensive. How expensive? Well, the bottom line is that “ADEs were associated with an increased adjusted … Read more

Quick Hit: Update on keeping up with medical literature with MedInfoNow

Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been over four months since I posted this piece on using MedInfoNow. The post caught the attention of someone at MedInfoNow, which resulted in some interesting dialogue in the form of email exchange and a couple of phone calls. I found the company to be genuinely interested in how their customers (clients?) use their product and what they can do to improve the experience.

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Ambiguous and Dangerous Abbreviations article results in interesting comment

There’s a little blurb in the March 2012 issue of Pharmacy Times about the dangers of using inappropriate abbreviations in prescriptions. The author gives a couple of good examples where the use of abbreviations resulted in errors. I’ve seen my fair share of crappy handwriting and liberal use of abbreviations during my career, and I almost always read … Read more