Month: March 2013

Saturday morning coffee [March 30 2013]

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MUG_MPSo much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right comes straight from Moonstone Pottery in Los Osos, California. It’s a pretty cool mug. It was a gift from my brother, Robert. Thanks bro.

The Croods was #1 at the box office last weekend to the tune of nearly $44 Million. I didn’t see that one coming. I knew that the movie was out, but had no interest in seeing it. My family chose instead to see Olympus Has Fallen. It was terribly predictable and a bit corny, but I liked it. It was full of lots of gratuitous violence and gun play, which makes it my kind of movie. Just for the record, Jack the Giant Slayer has officially flopped at the box office.

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The loss of Google Reader will be tough and here’s why

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The news that Google Reader is going to be sunset in July of this year has created somewhat of a panic among many, including myself.  The internet has been abuzz with articles on potential replacements. I’m sure people will look at many of these and find something to meet their needs, but what I’ve found thus far has been disappointing. I assume that’s because Google Reader was truly more than just a RSS aggregation tool for me.  A lot of the functionality that I used was the result of many third party developers that wrote plugins and scripts to do everything from rearranging the information on the page to removing ads. Google Reader was popular and mature, and it showed.

ReaderSTATS

 

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Saturday morning coffee [March 16 2013]

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MUG_ASHPSM2011So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right was presented to me as a gift from ASHP for winning the 2011 ASHP Summer Meeting Twitter Contest. Not to be confused with the one I put up last August for the 2010 ASHP Midyear Twitter contest. The mug was accompanied by a $50 Best Buy gift card; very nice. The meeting was held in Denver, CO and was the first ASHP Summer Meeting I ever attended. The Summer Meeting is quite a bit different from the Midyear Meeting held in December each year. Midyear is much larger and has a much wider variety of educational sessions. Midyear also has a bigger exhibitor area. With all that said I found the Summer Meeting quite enjoyable as it had several informatics related sessions that I was able to attend. It was the last pharmacy conference that I was able to enjoy as an attendee.

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Center for the study of pharmacy automation and technology [idea]

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Earlier this week I put up a post about a Prezi created by Dr. Robert Hoyt called Evidence Based Health Informatics: Replacing Hype with Science. It was a great presentation about a lot of the technology that healthcare has adopted over the years without any real evidence to back it up. I wish you could … Read more

Visualizing data – Tableau Software

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I spent the day in San Francisco attending the Tableau 8 Roadshow event.

Tableau is an amazing piece of software that helps you link to data in various forms – SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, Google analytics, and many, many more – and use that information to create stunning visualizations. It’s insanely easy to use, and quite frankly is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used to present data in an easy to understand manner.

Tableau

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Great Prezi on Evidence Based Health Informatics

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Thanks to Tim Cook over at Google+ for the lead on this one. I’m familiar with Prezi’s, but have never created one. I played around with the technology once, quickly became frustrated, and gave up. Anyway, the Prezi below from Dr. Robert Hoyt - Evidence Based Health Informatics » Replacing Hype with Science – has a lot of … Read more

Saturday morning coffee [March 9 2013]

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MUG_genericSo much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right isn’t one of my personal mugs. Instead it’s the kind of generic mug you get in cheesy hotel restaurants. And that’s because I’m not at home. I’m in Las Vegas for my daughter’s volleyball tournament. In lieu of that, and the fact that I had to crawl off into a “quiet” corner to open my laptop, I’m going to make this quick.

Jack the Giant Slayer was #1 at the box office last weekend. Not a big surprise as again there was little in the way of competition at the box office for a second week in a row. Jack brought in a measly $27 Million on its opening weekend. Not too bad, but when you consider the $195 Million production budget that makes it a flop. Yikes! My family and I saw Jack over the weekend. We enjoyed it. Identity Thief continues to do well as it came in second place for weekend box office totals.

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CPOE reduces likelihood of error by nearly 50% [article]? I’m skeptical

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There’s quite a bit of talk floating around the internet about a recent article in JAMIA that looks at reduction of medication errors in hospitals secondary to CPOE adoption (J Am Med Inform Assoc doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001241). The article is available for free so I read through it last weekend. By the end I was looking at something that wasn’t all that impressive. The authors use a lot of sleight of hand, i.e. statistical models to tell a story about how CPOE “decreases the likelihood of error on that order by 48%”, which ultimately could potentially lead to a reduction in medication errors by approximately 12.5%”. That would be great, except that the entire thing is based on statistical models, assumptions, survey data and a great big meta-analysis.

ChiefStatistian

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#1 thing to consider when buying pharmacy automation and/or technology…

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There are a ton of things to consider when you’re thinking about putting new technology in the pharmacy. You have to consider the cost, the impact on your operations, the reputation of the company that you’re buying from, what type of technology you’re going to buy, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. However, … Read more

MedFolio, more medication compliance technology

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Seems like everyone has some piece of technology designed to help patients with medication adherence and/or compliance.

What’s interesting to me is the number of different approaches there are out there to solve the problem. MedFolio looks similar to the old style medication organizers. It’s probably the most labor intensive solution I’ve seen, but then again it may be the most useful. Hard to say. From the videos I found on YouTube it looks like it’s been around for a while.

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