HealthcareITNews.com: “Physician groups in Phoenix are canceling their EMR contracts as a result of training, functionality or affordability issues. This is especially prevalent among smaller physician groups, the report says. ” – Software vendors take note. No matter how “cool” you think your product might be, people won’t use it if it is cumbersome and expensive. Unfortunately, this appears the be the rule in healthcare rather than the exception.
Author: Jerry Fahrni
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“What’d I miss?” – Week of June 22nd
As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.
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A rose by any other name….
HealthBlog: “Monday evening, I was invited to attend a dinner with my fellow panelists (Dr. David Kibbe, Ravi Sharma, Steve Adams, Martin Pellinat) and others to discuss the idea of clinical groupware. If you are not familiar with that term, clinical groupware is described as a set of practice management, electronic medical record, decision support, prescription writing and other solutions that could be delivered to clinical practices as services over the Internet.” – Hold the phone. Isn’t that the same thing as SaaS or clound computing or simply and extension of EMR/EHR? Sounds like it to me. Maybe we should all agree on a standard naming convention as different names for the same thing is more confusing than helpful. I’m just sayin’…
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Use AutoPharm Remote Ordering to restock your clean room.
Prior to the days of a clean room, most pharmacies had a designated area with one or move laminar flow hoods where they compounded intravenous (IV) medications. For lack of a better term this area was cleverly called the “IV Room”. The laminar flow hoods created a sterile work environment from which the pharmacy technicians could work. It was not uncommon for anyone making an IV preparation to simply leave the “IV Room” and wonder around the pharmacy looking for supplies when they ran short.
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Pen and paper versus technology.
Early morning hours on the weekend often provide me with a little quiet time to get some work done. Usually my wife and kids are still asleep and the day hasn’t really started yet. Last Saturday morning was one of those days. As I got up from my work to get another cup of coffee I felt a little amused at the image in front of me. My days are spent working with various types of pharmacy technology, computers, automated storage devices, barcoding equipment, etc., but there on the table in front of me was a paper notepad and an ink pen.
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Insight into poor handwriting and why EHRs are important.
Florence dot com: “1. People who prescribe medications should use a system more sophisticated than the pine straw delivery guy’s [pen and paper]Â to communicate high-stakes drug information. 1,400 commonly prescribed drugs have names that look-alike or sound-alike. People can, and do, die when drug names are confused with one another.
2. Pharmacies should be able to receive prescription data in a format that does not require the tenacity of a middle-school math teacher on summer holiday to decipher.
3. Your electronic medication history–housed with your physicians, pharmacy, and any consumer portal you choose–should move seamlessly into hospital data repositories and be accessible, with your consent, during planned and emergent encounters.”
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Physician’s stolen laptop contains patient information
EMR and HIPPA: “This story made me think of two things:
1. Why is PHI being stored on the laptop in the first place? I wish I could find out if there was an EMR involved. If there was, then the EMR should be storing all of the patient information on the server and none of that data should be stored on the laptop. So, if it gets stolen there’s no breach. That’s the beauty of an EMR these days. There should be no need for this to happen.
2. There’s some really cool technology that’s been coming out in recent laptops that will allow you to remotely wipe out the laptop if it ever gets connected to a network. Basically, once your laptop is stolen you report it stolen and they start tracking it down kind of like they do with stolen cars (same people from what I understand).” – The story associated with this blog goes on to say that “Patient names, treatment dates, short medical treatment summaries and medical record numbers were stored on the computer.“ This wouldn’t have been an issue if all the patient information was stored in the “cloud” and viewed and updated via a secure connection when necessary. Security aside, data stored on a local hard drive increases the chance for lost or duplicate data. Anyway you slice it, this was a bonehead move. -
“What’d I miss?” – Week of June 14th
As usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.
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Cool Technology for Pharmacy
Alaris System: “The Alaris® System by Cardinal Health is designed for infusions and patient monitoring. It helps protect the patient and clinician from consequences of medical errors and helps positively affect patient outcomes through continuous improvements in clinical practice. The point-of-care platform standardizes every type of infusion on a common user interface and adds respiratory monitoring and bar coding as needed. Also a state-of-the-art computer, it bridges the gap between IV and IT to help prevent harm and optimize care.”
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