Month: September 2013

Homegrown medication tracking at Children’s Hospital Boston

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Children’s Hospital Boston is a 395-bed children’s hospital located in the Longwood Medical Center area of Boston Massachusetts. It’s a pretty cool place near Harvard School of Medicine as well as the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences; not to mention that it’s literally right across the street from the famous Brigham and Women’s … Read more

Getting creative with pharmacy labels: dosing calculations

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I was searching for inpatient pharmacy label examples, specifically IV label examples, for a project that I’m working on and came across a site called RxLabelToolkit.com. It’s a neat little site that offers quite a bit of information on label design. I don’t know if the business is still active as the most recent post … Read more

Biologists develop new method for discovering antibiotics

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Science Daily: “Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a revolutionary new method for identifying and characterizing antibiotics, an advance that could lead to the discovery of new antibiotics to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. The researchers made their discovery by developing a way to perform the equivalent of an autopsy on bacterial … Read more

Thoughts on the current state of mobile computing

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The phrase “mobile computing” has been around for a long time. Remember the “Ultra-Mobile PC” (UMPC) movement back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s? That was an exciting time for mobile computing. Unfortunately the excitement was limited to a very small circle. Back then, the technology simply wasn’t ready for widespread consumer adoption. The machines were cool, but clunky, slow, and insanely expensive. People were not ready to embrace something that required more than a cursory knowledge of technology. Even though the technology was not anywhere near what it is today, I firmly believe that many of the concepts floating around during the UMPC days were fundamentally better than much of what we have on the market today. We’ve progressed forward in many ways, but slid backward in others. It’s unfortunate that society wasn’t ready for the concepts back then. Imagine where we would be today if we would have continued to develop the UMPC concepts and ideas from the 90’s.

OQO2

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The future of 340B, my perspective

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The snippets below are taken from a recent article in Pharmacy Times: The Future of 340B: It’s All About Perspective

“Established more than 20 years ago [the 340B Drug Discount Program], this legislation was enacted to assist different health care settings in providing excellent care for indigent and vulnerable patients. To allow this to happen, safety net providers have access to discounted outpatient drugs from manufacturers. By being able to purchase the discounted medications, these qualifying organizations are able to utilize the savings to provide care for those uninsured and underinsured patients. “ – The 340B Drug Discount Program can be a great thing for healthcare systems that care for a lot of ‘uninsured’ or ‘underinsured’ patients. These are often time indigent patients.

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Back in the saddle again

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“I`m back in the saddle again, out where a friend is a friend” – Gene Autry It was 49 days between the time I was unceremoniously released from duty as a product manager by my previous employer until I finally went back to work. You can see my thoughts on my search for a job … Read more

Saturday morning coffee [September 6 2013]: The Butler, Surface, Med Adherence, Note 3

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“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” ~ C.S.Lewis

So 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….

I have officially run out of coffee mugs from which to pull for my SMC posts. The coffee mug below was a Christmas present from my youngest daughter, Mikaela, and will be used as my official SMC mug for the time being.

MUG_SMC

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Real-time medication tracking: Pharmtrac.PD by PlusDelta Technologies

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I’ve been revisiting some of the pharmacy technology that I’ve covered over the past few years. Partly to see what advances have been made, if any, and partly to see if some of the smaller guys I’ve come across are still in business.

PlusDelta Technologies is an interesting little company that I discovered at the ASHP Summer Meeting in Denver in 2011. I was impressed with their vision, and with their use of mobile technology to track medications throughout the distribution process. At the time the company had a small suite of products, but as I sit here looking at their website it appears that they’ve whittled it down to just one: Pharmtrac.PD. Focus people, that’s called focus.

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