This is my final post of 2012. Random thoughts about things that I’ve seen, heard and/or read over the past twelve months.
Twenty-twelve was an interesting year for the Fahrni clan, and not in a good way. We lost one of our own and had some bad things happen. We also had some good times, but it won’t be a year that I’ll miss all that much.
We all survived the Mayan Apocalypse
We experienced the last repeating date of the century: 12-12-12
(more…)
A colleague wished me a happy two year anniversary the other day. Apparently LinkedIn tracks that kind of stuff. I knew it had been about two years since leaving pharmacy practice and becoming a product manager, but I hadn’t really given it a whole lot of thought until now.
So, two years. What’s that mean? Not much really, especially if you buy into the theory outlined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. According to Gladwell it takes about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to truly master a skill, any skill. Given that I’ve been a product manager for two years, and assuming that an average year is about 2,000 hours of work, which we know is laughable, then I’ve barely scratched the surface.
(more…)
I’ve just returned from a week in Las Vegas, NV at ASHP Midyear 2012. The ASHP Midyear conference is the pinnacle of clinical meetings each year for most acute care pharmacists. For me it’s not that interesting anymore as I don’t attend as a pharmacist. It just more work days for me; long work days. I didn’t attend a single “sessionâ€, but did manage to find some time to walk through the exhibit hall once and catch up with some old friends.
Enough of that, on with the thoughts:
(more…)
I spent a few hours on a plane today. I do all kinds of things when I’m stuck on a plane. I used to work, but that got old after a while. Now I play games, read for pleasure, listen to music, or simply think. Today was a thinking day. I tried playing a game, but my mind was fixated on other things. It’s quite irritating when that happens as I’d rather play games. Anyway, today my mind was focused on pharmacy, which is nothing unusual. I think about pharmacy a lot. Here are some of the things that are floating around my mind:
(more…)
According to good ol’ Merriam-Webster irony is defined as “the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaningâ€. That’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the article referred to in the Tweet below from @ClinicalInnTech.
R.I. hospital’s new NICU allows for infant care delivery innovations ow.ly/dYAIa PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Welcome to the future of…
— CI+T (@ClinicalInnTech) September 25, 2012
The article talks about a state-of-the-art NICU at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. The article has some great information in it and paints a great picture of some of the cool things that are being done there, but the presentation embedded in the article made me laugh.
Slide #10 shows “resident pediatrician Carly Guss, MD, [pushing] a workstation on wheels [W.O.W.] through the NICU hallway toward a patient’s roomâ€(image below). How much paper do you think can actually fit on that W.O.W.? It’s a good thing they’re using state-of-the-art technology. I’d hate to see what it would look like if they were using antiquated technology. The full set of slides can be found on SlideShare.
I enjoy my gadgets. I enjoy them a lot. I take them everywhere I go. I’m not obsessed with them, but I find that they help me pass the time when I’m by myself or during quite periods when my crew is still sleeping.
Everyone in my family has an “electronics bag†that they carry their stuff in when we travel. During our summer vacation this year I got tickled watching everyone pack their gadget bags. I had everyone lay their stuff out on our coffee table and I snapped a quick photo. The image is below. As you can see it’s quite a bit of stuff.
I change up my travel gear all the time. I have both a work laptop and a tablet PC. I used to travel with both machines, but it became cumbersome, especially with all the security at airports. So now I only take one machine depending on what I’m doing, i.e. when I travel for work I take my work machine and when I travel for fun I take my tablet PC.
My other options when I travel include:
I’ve been trying to pare it down a bit as my bag is getting heavy. I’m considering going in two completely different directions.
Option 1: Get a Lenovo X1 Carbon to replace both my work laptop and my tablet PC, and add a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1Â to replace my need for note taking on a tablet.
Option 2: Get a new Windows 8 hybrid tablet like the Samsung ATIV Smart PC to replace my work machine and take the place of my aging Lenovo t201x tablet PC. With this scenario I’d continue to carry my Samsung Tab 7.0 Plus.
Option 2 is much cheaper, but Option 1 has a pretty solid coolness factor associated with it. I’ll mull this over for a while, at least until the new Windows 8 machines appear on the scene.
I’ve read quite a bit lately about all the changes to Twitter. The incessant complaining, the non-stop blood-clot cryin’, the “Twitter has gone too far†rhetoric, and so on. Whatever Twitter has done has irritated a lot of people, but doesn’t seem to have hurt them much, if at all. I don’t really care one way or the other. I use the native Twitter client on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Samsung Tab 7.0 Plus; seems to work just fine.  No problems noted. I use the Silver Bird add on for Google Chrome to handle my Tweeting when I’m online, and I use Buffer when I’m inside Google Reader. Haven’t seen any problems there either.
I’ve been using a service called IFTTT – awesome tool by the way – to send all my Tweets directly to an Evernote Notebook where they’re archived for all eternity, or until something happens to the cloud. So each time I compose a new Tweet it’s automatically captured and appended to my “IFTTT Twitter†Notebook in Evernote. It’s great.
Unfortunately it looks like that’s all about to come to an end. I received the following email yesterday:
It’s a real bummer. It won’t stop me from using Twitter, but it’s still a bit frustrating that something so incredibly effective at automating the archiving of my Tweets is being shut down.
Delivering drugs into the brain is notoriously difficult. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have published a report in the August 29 issue of Science Translational Medicine that they have designed nanoparticles that can safely and predictably infiltrate deep into the brain. Pretty cool.
A Dense Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Coating Improves Penetration of Large Polymeric Nanoparticles Within Brain Tissue Elizabeth A. Nance, Graeme F. Woodworth, Kurt A. Sailor, Ting-Yu Shih, Qingguo Xu, Ganesh Swaminathan, Dennis Xiang, Charles Eberhart, and Justin Hanes Sci Transl Med 29 August 2012
ABSTRACT
Prevailing opinion suggests that only substances up to 64 nm in diameter can move at appreciable rates through the brain extracellular space (ECS). This size range is large enough to allow diffusion of signaling molecules, nutrients, and metabolic waste products, but too small to allow efficient penetration of most particulate drug delivery systems and viruses carrying therapeutic genes, thereby limiting effectiveness of many potential therapies. We analyzed the movements of nanoparticles of various diameters and surface coatings within fresh human and rat brain tissue ex vivo and mouse brain in vivo. Nanoparticles as large as 114 nm in diameter diffused within the human and rat brain, but only if they were densely coated with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). Using these minimally adhesive PEG-coated particles, we estimated that human brain tissue ECS has some pores larger than 200 nm and that more than one-quarter of all pores are ≥100 nm. These findings were confirmed in vivo in mice, where 40- and 100-nm, but not 200-nm, nanoparticles spread rapidly within brain tissue, only if densely coated with PEG. Similar results were observed in rat brain tissue with paclitaxel-loaded biodegradable nanoparticles of similar size (85 nm) and surface properties. The ability to achieve brain penetration with larger nanoparticles is expected to allow more uniform, longer-lasting, and effective delivery of drugs within the brain, and may find use in the treatment of brain tumors, stroke, neuroinflammation, and other brain diseases where the blood-brain barrier is compromised or where local delivery strategies are feasible.
All the companies that have spent millions developing a “better way†to dispense medications (tablets) should watch the video below. The company that makes Tic Tacs has you all beat. And just a guess here, but I bet that little plastic Tic Tac dispenser doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Someone needs to develop a prescription bottle that works like this. Walgreens has been doing a lot of consumer prescription stuff lately. Perhaps they would be interested in investing a little time, energy and effort. Never know.
File this one under idea: #10987.
I literally chuckled out loud when I read this abstract from the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). Yes, chuckled. It wasn’t a full laugh because it was just so pathetic. I struggled trying to decide what blog category to place this article in. It’s not really mobile, but then again I suppose you can read your email from any smartphone. No, that would be giving the article more credit than it deserves. I suppose it could be lumped in with Technology. No, this is 2012. How about Therapeutics. No, not really. Huh, I’m stumped. None of the above it is.