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.
EMR
Cool Technology for Pharmacy – Practice Fusion EMR
Practice Fusion is a company based out of San Francisco that offers a free web-based electronic medical record (EMR), or is it electronic health record (EHR). To the best of my knowledge Practice Fusion was founded in 2005 and has been rapidly expanding ever since. Practice Fusion offers its EMR software free of charge in exchange for putting up with a few advertisements. The advertisements are non-obtrusive and don’t appear to get in the way of any of the application’s functionality. In fact, I didn’t even notice them. The best part of this revenue model is that it makes the software freely accessible to any physician that would like to use it. In addition, users are not required to install any new hardware of software. Very nice.
New edition of “Keys to EMR/EHR Success” available
EMR Daily News: “Greenbranch Publishing announces the Second Edition of the breakthrough book for practices eager to minimize the costs, confusion and outright risks of choosing and implementing an Electronic Medical Record system. Keys to EMR/EHR Success: Selecting and Implementing an Electronic Medical Record, 2nd Edition by Ronald Sterling, CPA, MBA, paperback, 304 pages, ISBN: … Read more
“What’d I miss?” – Week of May 17, 2010
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.
Cool Technology for Pharmacy – eDoc Telemedicine System
Telemedicine is one of those technologies that is either going to be unbelievably useful or a complete waste of time. Only time will tell. Recent articles like the one in Archives of Internal Medicine suggest that it may have a place in healthcare. Pharmacists may find telemedicine a useful tool for communicating with patients or physicians over great distances. I can see value in that.
While not specifically designed for pharmacy, the eDoc Telemedicine/EHR System is a cool piece of technology. For information to be useful it needs to be collected and made available at the point of care, which is exactly what this system does.
“What’d I miss?” – Week of February 28th, 2010
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.
Epic launches Haiku, an iPhone EHR application
“After three months of rumors, details surrounding Epic Systems’ partnership with Apple for a mobile phone-based electronic health record (EHR) application have come to light: Just a few days ago, Epic System’s iPhone application, called Haiku, became available on Apple’s AppStore. Haiku provides authorized clinical users of Epic’s Electronic Health Record with secure access to … Read more
We need a better system for medication reconciliation
Medication reconciliation is defined by JCAHO as “the process of comparing a patient’s medication orders to all of the medications that the patient has been taking. This reconciliation is done to avoid medication errors such as omissions, duplications, dosing errors, or drug interactions.†The process should be fairly straight forward, but it is actually very difficult and time consuming.
“What’d I miss?” – Week of December 27th
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.
Cool Technology for Pharmacy
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.