While not specifically related to pharmacy, this is very interesting. Stephen S. Hau, the founder of PatientKeeper in the 90’s, has created a new product called Shareable Ink. The product uses a digital pen on paper forms to capture handwriting. The information is transferred, via wireless connection, to a server where the information is digitized. The technology is not new per se, but the application to medicine in this way is.
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Category: Cool Technology
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Cool Technology for Pharmacy
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Best of the web, well for today anyway
Just some items of interest that various folks on Twitter forced me to read.
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Cool Technology for Pharmacy
The MedBoard Medication Tracking System (MTS) from Baxa is a web-based medication system designed to help you track the flow of medications from entry in the pharmacy system to delivery on the nursing unit. The MTS can be integrated into you pharmacy workflow as part of your existing bar coding system.
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Sugar-Coated nanoparticles hold promise for cancer treatment
A research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in cooperation with researchers at The Johns Hopkins University, Dartmouth College, the University of Manitoba and two biopharmaceutical companies have discovered that sugar-coated bits of iron oxide under certain circumstances can be deadly to tumors. The 100 nanometer wide sugar-coated iron oxide nanoparticles are attracted to tumor cells, where they can be heated magnetically, thus causing damage to the cells.
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Great new idea for “InkPad” at GottaBeMobile
Matthew Dillon at GottaBeMobile has come up with a great concept for a new tablet device that he calls “ink padâ€. The most entertaining thing about the concept is that I have designed several of these on paper over the years myself. My scribbles are recorded in various notebooks lying around the house. Like Matthew, I too love Tablet PCs but have always felt that there is still a yet to be developed device that would be better.
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Cool Technology for Pharmacy
The InstyMeds Prescription Medication Dispenser is a fully automated prescription dispensing machine. It is  designed to be used in high traffic areas where quick medication turnaround is desired and a physical pharmacy is unavailable, such as emergency departments (ED) and acute care clinics.The dispenser has just over 100 medication slots that can each hold a medication magazine with up to 11 prepackaged medication bottles. The formulary for the InstyMeds machine is site specific and designed by the InstyMeds Corporation. Items in the example formulary that I viewed included amoxicillin capsules, amoxicillin suspension, Auralgan otic drops, Z-Pak, Augmentin, acetaminophen tablets and elixir, ibuprofen, Vicodin, Darvocet, etc. All the items you would expect from a short visit to the ED or for little Joey with an ear infection at the urgent care. The formulary in the InstyMeds machine can be altered based on seasonal trends and inventory replacement is automatically  shipped to the location when needed based on real time inventory tracking. In addition, consumables such as printer paper are also automatically tracked by the InstyMeds Corporation via an internal web cam.
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All roads lead to Rome, err….I mean Twitter.
Until the next big thing comes along Twitter is king. That’s why I found this Tweet from Robert Scoble so interesting. The Tweet itself simply let me to a blog article written by Louis Gray. The blog discusses two distinctly different approaches to sharing information; Louis Gray’s approach versus Robert Scoble.Louis utilizes Google Reader to collect and sort various RSS feeds. Any story, blog, article, etc. that he finds interesting get pushed to Twitter via the share feature in Google Reader (see the graphical representation at Louis’ site).
In the other corner you have Robert “using not RSS, but Twitter, to share the best of the technology Web as it streams on his screen.†Robert appears to be making extensive use of his Twitter Favorites.
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D&D on Microsoft Surface table
Surface blog: “I don’t want to put any pressure on Michael and the team over at Carnegie Mellon University, but you guys should be getting an A for your class project this semester. Their Dungeons & Dragons experience called “Surfacescapes†on Microsoft Surface is amazing. This is the future of how computers will aid in board games. Remember, D&D playing aids like this are for serious role playing gamers who might normally use balsa cutouts and not just wimpy printed maps. The computer is has a technical role in the gameplay but the DM and the players are the storytellers. That’s why it doesn’t look exactly like a video game. Not that it isn’t seven shades of wonderful.” – This has nothing to do with pharmacy, but it’s wicked cool stuff. I spent many hours playing D&D with paper, pencil and physical dice. I remember when I thought hi-tech was writing a small app that would randomly generate characters on my then new Commodore 64. That was before I realized programming was hard and chose an easier career; pharmacy.
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Cool Technology for Pharmacy
A group of researches has created a hydrogel membrane that “opens†and “closes†in response to magnetic flux. The discovery could lead to delivery systems capable of precision drug therapy for a host of conditions.
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Looking forward to clinical advancement with Windows 7
HealthBlog: ““For example, as the use of tablet PCs within healthcare continues to grow, many of us will welcome the improved hand-writing recognition facility in Windows 7. It also learns, so the recognition gets better the more I use it.†He says the same is true for voice recognition: “I just talk to my PC and it does what I want, from opening programs to dictating letters.â€Â The true party piece of Windows 7, though, is its support for touch – not just touchscreens but what has come to be called ‘gesturing’; support for a sophisticated but more naturalistic way of interacting with technology. “Clinicians are able to zoom in on an image by moving two fingers closer together, like they’re pinching something, or zoom out by moving two fingers apart,†says Dr Crounse. “They’ll even be able to move an image on the screen by rotating one finger around another, and right-click by holding one finger on their target while tapping the screen with another.†This sort of natural manipulation of text, images and multimedia will make computer equipment less obtrusive in the clinician-patient relationship; and should make technology accessible to many communities which use healthcare extensively, yet were previously somewhat overlooked by IT: for example the elderly.” – I’ve been a proponent of touch technology for quite a while and firmly believe that it will have a positive impact on healthcare professionals. We’ve already seen an explosion in the number of devices developed to take advantage of Windows 7 and multi-touch technology. I, for one, can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of Windows 7 to install on my tablet.