Sterile compounding optimization during COVID-19

From January 2020 until March of 2022, I was one of two inpatient pharmacy supervisors at Community Regional Medical Center (CRMC) in Fresno, California. CRMC is a big level one trauma center. They have about every imaginable service, minus only bone marrow and solid-organ transplants. The pharmacy is large and busy. The size and complexity … Read more

25 Years a Failed Career 

I recently took a job as the Director of Pharmacy for a medium sized – just over 400 beds – acute care hospital a couple of hours away from my home in Fresno. I never wanted to be a director. I always told myself that if I ended up working in a pharmacy, it was because … Read more

Epic will eventually control IV workflow management

Pulling another article from the notebook archive, penned March 20, 2020. I have seen the future of IV workflow management systems (IVWFMS). Spoiler alert, EPIC wins. And before people start calling me an Epic fanboy, I should make it clear that I do not like Epic, as a company or a product. I believe healthcare … Read more

Remdesivir, the pharmacy budget buster

I saw the discussion below in one of the pharmacy forums. Fact check true on this one. Gilead would have everyone believe that remdesivir is a magic bullet for COVID-19 infection. Not true. Helpful? Useful tool? Maybe. Remdesivir, while potentially beneficial, has limitations. For one, it should only be used on hospitalized patients that have … Read more

The impact of COVID-19 on Pharmacy Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

COVID-19 has taught us many things, among them that our healthcare supply chain is poorly designed and flimsy. Just a few weeks into the pandemic and our supply chain for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has been completely disrupted. PPE is now in short supply, and I suspect that we will run out of PPE in … Read more

Pharmacy Integration is Starting to Make Sense

I’ve been writing about the need for pharmacy integration for years. Most of it negative, and deservedly so because it’s been lousy. With that said, things appear to have changed in recent years. Integration, it seems, has slowly become a thing. Maybe because I’ve been out of general pharmacy practice for so long that it … Read more