“Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.†― Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
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 problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.†– Charles Bukowski
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….
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 is from the Netherlands. Just in case you’ve forgotten, I stopped in Amsterdam back in November 2011 on my way to Germany for work. Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands and serves as the regions capital. It’s also a dirty city with a weird vibe to it. Didn’t care for it. I would return to Germany in a heartbeat, but wouldn’t choose to spend any personal time in Amsterdam. I can’t really say much about the rest of the Netherlands.
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 cup below is several years old. It’s a plastic Starbucks cup that I picked up somewhere in either Fresno or Visalia, California during my time as an IT Pharmacist at Kaweah Delat Medical Center in Visalia. The commute from my front door to Kaweah is just under an hour. There’s a Starbucks around the corner from my house and I used to swing by there on the way to work several mornings each week. Seemed like a shame to throw away all those cups, so I bought this dude. This weekend it’s sitting on the desk of a hotel room in San Mateo, California as I wait for my crew to stir so we can make our way to my daughter’s volleyball tournament.
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.
Here’s an interesting concept.
SharePractice is an application that uses the idea of crowdsourcing other physicians to rank treatments for various disease states.
“Good doctors make bad decisions because knowledge sources are incomplete and static. Medical reference tools are biased by business interests and take too long to update. Reading research papers is an antiquated process that most busy doctors just don’t have time to read.
It is challenging for doctors to remain aware of new or effective treatments because there are no easy ways for us to communicate, evaluate and share clinical insights. So we call, text, email, use forums and go to conferences. But this data is not collected and it is lost.
Share Practice gives doctors power to collaborate on treatments and rate clinical efficacy. Our next generation medical reference gives every doctor the ability to ‘publish’ findings, get feedback from the community, review conventional therapies and incorporate new and integrative medicines into the collective knowledge-base.
Share Practice is the most current source of medical information, contributed to and maintained by doctors around the world. Beautifully simple, mobile and freely available, Share Practice is built for doctors; by doctors.â€
Check the video below to get a better idea of what SharePractice is.
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.â€
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.
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.
GigaOM: “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.â€
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.
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 to the right comes straight from Moonstone Pottery in Los Osos, California. It’s a pretty cool mug. It was a gift from my brother, Robert. Thanks bro.
The Croods was #1 at the box office last weekend to the tune of nearly $44 Million. I didn’t see that one coming. I knew that the movie was out, but had no interest in seeing it. My family chose instead to see Olympus Has Fallen. It was terribly predictable and a bit corny, but I liked it. It was full of lots of gratuitous violence and gun play, which makes it my kind of movie. Just for the record, Jack the Giant Slayer has officially flopped at the box office.
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