Jerry Fahrni

Tag: Medication Adherence

  • Saturday morning coffee [May 18 2013]

    So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

    The coffee mug below was a gift that I received from the unSUMMIT U for giving a barcoding webinar back in January. For those of you that don’t know, the unSUMMIT is all about barcoding, of which I have a fair amount of experience/expertise.  The unSUMMIT U is an extension of the unSUMMIT that offers webinars about barcoding throughout the year. I’ve attended a couple.

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  • Medication therapy management at TEDxUniversity [video]

    Thanks to Megan Hartranft (@MeganPharmD) and John Poikonen (@poikonen) for tweeting this. It’s nothing earth shattering, but it sums up why pharmacists should be more involved. Tim Ulbrich does a really nice job.

    Pharmacy schools should show this short video to all their pharmacy students before turning them loose on the world. I talked about some of this in my presentation at the HIMSS Southern California Annual Clinical Informatics Summit a couple of weeks ago.

    There was a time when I thought that the best place to engage patients was in the hospital, but I’m starting to rethink that position. If you think about it, engaging patients in the hospital is a bit of a reactive approach. We need to engage patients before they’re hospitalized to get the most bang for our buck.

  • Saturday morning coffee [May 11 2013]

    MUG_Talyst3So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

    The coffee mug to the right is from the company I work for. Strange little story to go along with how I ended up working there, but that’s probably better saved for another time. I ended up with a mug from the company long before I came on board. It was part of a swag bag at one of the past user group meetings that I attended as a customer. I believe it was my first ASHP Summer meeting way back in June of 2009; can’t be sure though.

    Iron Man 3 was #1 at the box office last weekend raking in a cool $174 million. No surprise there as Iron Man 3 was expected to be a blockbuster. I wasn’t able to see it over the weekend, but did manage to catch it Monday night. Was it good? Absolutely, it was a very good move. However, I was a bit disappointed. There was a lot going on in the movie, and some of it felt “off”. I’d still see it again. It’s a bummer that this is likely the end of the Iron Man franchise. Oh, just in case you were wondering Pain and Gain was a close second with $7.5 million in weekend gross; a mere 23 fold difference.
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  • Info packets instead of a pharmacist used in attempt to improve medication adherence

    angry_monkeyI came across an article today in The Baltimore Sun that caught my attention.

    According to the article: “In a test of services geared toward making sure patients took their prescribed medications after leaving the emergency room, none made a difference, a large new study suggests.

    Based on the experiment involving nearly 4,000 ER patients, researchers found that information packets, personal assistance and even access to an on-call medical librarian to answer questions about the drugs did not lead patients to fill more prescriptions or to take them as directed when they left the hospital.”

    The best line from the article has to be that patients were given “access to an on-call medical librarian to answer questions about the drugs [they were prescribed]” This has to get the head-scratcher of the year award. The lunacy of healthcare never ceases to amaze me. Why, oh why would you give patients access to a medical librarian to answer drug questions. I have great respect for medical librarians, but that’s not their domain.

    And as a surprise to no one, “One week after ER discharge, 88 percent of patients had filled their prescription, according to pharmacy records, and in a phone interview 48 percent reported taking the medication as prescribed. Those percentages did not differ between the participating groups.”

    No kidding. Medication adherence is an incredibly complex problem with many different reasons why patients choose not to get their prescriptions filled or fail to take them consistently and accurately.

    Depending on the study you read, medication adherence costs the United States anywhere from $100 billion to $290 billion annually, including increased morbidity, lost time from work, readmissions, etc. Pharmacists have been shown to help. Handing out pamphlets has not.

    Honestly, I’m surprised that the Annals of Emergency Medicine would publish such crap. My cats leave equivalent work in the yard all the time, but at least they try to cover it up.

    The article – Does Providing Prescription Information or Services Improve Medication Adherence Among Patients Discharged From the Emergency Department? A Randomized Controlled Trial – can be found here.

    Morons.

  • Smartphone medication adherence apps [Article]

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    Not sure how I missed this one, but there’s an article in the March-April 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacist Association that covers smartphone applications for medication adherence.

    Smartphone medication adherence apps: Potential benefits to patients and providers (J Am Pharm Assoc. 2013;53:172-181)

    From the abstract: “160 adherence apps were identified and ranked. These apps were most prevalent for the Android OS. Adherence apps with advanced functionality were more prevalent on the Apple iPhone OS. Among all apps, MyMedSchedule, MyMeds, and RxmindMe rated the highest because of their basic medication reminder features coupled with their enhanced levels of functionality.”

    There’s a lot of good information in the article, especially the bibliography. To top it off, the article is available in its entirety for free so go get it. Actually, the entire March-April issue is worth reading.

  • Evolution of [Pharmacy] Practice in an Age of Information [Presentation]

    Yesterday I was at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange, CA. for the HIMSS Southern California Chapter 5th Annual Clinical Informatics Summit: Adventures in Clinical Informatics. I was there to give a presentation about pharmacy. It’s the first public presentation I’ve given since retiring from the presentation game just over two years ago. Now that it’s over I’m heading back into presenter retirement.

    The presentation in its entirety has been uploaded to Slideshare and is embedded below. Some of the slides didn’t show up at the time of upload. I tried a couple of different things to get them to show up, but at last view they still weren’t there.

  • Gamification for medication compliance: Mango Health

    mango-health1GigaOM: “Mango Health, founded by former executives from mobile gaming company ngmoco, is using game mechanics to get people to be more conscientious about managing their health.

    Mango Health… believes that by combining game mechanics with an intuitive, fun design and useful features, they can keep patients on track. Since August, the company has been beta testing the app with a small set of users, but on Tuesday it said it had launched in the app store.

    The app offers several tools, including a simple way to check for medication interactions and timed reminders to take your meds. The app’s colorful, clean design is more inviting than many health apps on the market. But the real trick to getting people to stay hooked is a reward system. Each day, users have the opportunity to earn 10 points for letting the app know that they took their medication. Over time, those points can be redeemed for perks like Target gift cards and charity donations.”

    Details at the Mango Health website are a bit sketchy, and I couldn’t locate a video of the app in action.

    Mango Health is available only for the iPhone, which is a bit of a bummer.

  • MedFolio, more medication compliance technology

    Seems like everyone has some piece of technology designed to help patients with medication adherence and/or compliance.

    What’s interesting to me is the number of different approaches there are out there to solve the problem. MedFolio looks similar to the old style medication organizers. It’s probably the most labor intensive solution I’ve seen, but then again it may be the most useful. Hard to say. From the videos I found on YouTube it looks like it’s been around for a while.
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  • Cool Pharmacy Technology – AdhereTech “smart pill bottle”

    AdhereTechI came across this today, the AdhereTech “smart pill bottle”. Not sure exactly how it works as the information on the website is a bit vague, but it appears to utilize sensors inside the bottle to measure content. What’s cool about it is that the bottle will provide information on both oral solids as well as liquids. That’s unique in the products that I’ve seen in the past.

    “Our bottles measure the exact amount of pills or liquid in the bottle in real-time, wirelessly send this HIPAA-compliant data into the cloud, and remind patients to take their medication via automated phone call or text message.”

    Medication adherence is a hot topic in healthcare these days, and AdhereTech is obviously trying to take advantage of it. Their blog is full of articles related to the topic.

    I would like to have provided more information on the AdhereTech bottle, but information on the product is scarce. I couldn’t find a single video explaining the product in detail.

    According to Josh Stein, the co-founder and CEO the company is preparing for several pilot projects to test the efficacy of their bottles compared to standard medication vials. The tests are scheduled to start in Q2 of 2013 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and The University of Pennsylvania.

    One other cool thing about AdhereTech is that they have an open API. “AdhereTech can integrate with all existing apps, programs, and adherence solutions.”

    I’ll be keeping an eye out for updates on this product. It’s an interesting concept. I hope to see it in the wild very soon.

  • Saturday morning coffee [February 23 2013]

    So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

    MUG_MinneapolisThe coffee mug from the right is straight out of the Twin Cities area, i.e. the Minneapolis-Saint Paul in Minnesota. I picked it up at a Caribou Coffee shop in Minneapolis. Apparently Caribou Coffee is a locally owned business in the Twin Cities area. I have no idea really, but that’s what I was told and the website does list a local address (3900 Lakebreeze Ave N., Minneapolis, MN 55429). The coffee is pretty good I thought the mug looked cool. It was the first time I had ever been to the Minneapolis area. I don’t recommend it as a tourist spot in the winter. It was cold boys and girls. The first night I was there it was a cool 0 (zero) degrees F. One neat thing about the trip was that I got a chance to go to the Mall of America. Impressive place.
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