Jerry Fahrni

Tag: Patient Safety

  • Cool Technology for Healthcare – GPS SmartSole

    Yep, you read the right, GPS-enabled insoles for your shoes. Very interesting concept when you stop to consider the potential benefits of such technology in healthcare, i.e. think Alzheimer’s for one, although the use cases are expansive.

    Up until a couple of weeks ago I had never heard of the GPS SmartSole, but apparently they’ve been around for a while. According to the company website – GTX Corp – the product has been around since 2008. Who knew?

    The technology gives users the ability to track individual’s location via any smartphone, tablet, or other web-enabled device. Caregivers can even configure the system to send text and email alerts when the user leaves a designated area. Of course it only works if the user is wearing their shoes.

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  • Saturday morning coffee [August 2 2014]

    “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao-tzu, Chinese philosopher (604 BC – 531 BC)

    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 relatively new. I picked it up in Las Vegas at M&M World during one of my daughter’s volleyball tournaments earlier this year.

    Yellow M&M Mug
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  • Medical errors remain a problem despite years of effort

    I recently read an article at Senator Bernie Sanders website about preventable medication errors. The article lists preventable medical errors in hospitals as the third leading cause of death in the U.S. behind only heart disease and cancer.

    The article goes on to say that “the Journal of Patient Safety recently published a study which concluded that as many as 440,000 people die each year from preventable medical errors in hospitals. Tens of thousands also die from preventable mistakes outside hospitals, such as deaths from missed diagnoses or because of injuries from medications.” I’m not exactly sure what article they’re referencing here as they didn’t provide a link or additional information, but I assume they’re referring to the article by James in September 2013. Just a guess, I could be wrong.1 Regardless of the actual reference, the bottom line is that the number of patients that die from preventable medical errors is high.
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  • Color labels for pharmacy – Quick Label Systems

    QuickLabel

    I was rummaging through my travel bag and found some items that I collected during the ASHP Summer Meeting back in June. Most of the information had to do with IV room systems, tablet identification, and so on. But there was one item that caught my eye that didn’t fit with the rest: color labels.

    I’ve written about the use of color on pharmacy labels before. It has its place, but in my opinion the major barriers have been cost and label quality. That’s why I was so interested when I saw the booth from Quick Label Systems at the ASHP Summer Meeting. The labels they had on display were spectacular. It’s difficult to see in my photo, but the image quality and label stock are top notch. The labels are tough –  really tough – resistant to water, and don’t smear. Very nice.

    The quality of the label and print gives users the ability to place a crazy array of information on the label, including the ability to embed audio or links to video using bar code technology. It’s pretty cool.

    The company isn’t a pharmacy solution in the traditional sense, but do provide OEM services for other companies. In other words, if you have a need for color labels Quick Label Systems will build color label printers with your name on them.

    Not every product that leaves the pharmacy needs a color label, but they could certainly be useful in the IV room. Using color to differentiate or highlight something that requires special attention like chemotherapy is always helpful to pharmacy and nursing.

    I’ll try to get the rest of my bag’s contents up over the next few days.

  • Drug monitoring in IV tubing using Raman spectroscopy

    chemistryworld: “Recent research, led by Brian Cunningham at the University of Illinois in the US, has produced biomedical tubing that uses surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to monitor the contents and concentrations of drugs within a patient’s IV line.  The plasmonic nanodome array surface enhances the Raman signals.  The tubing could detect 10 pharmaceutical compounds with reproducible signals for a period of up to five days. For four of the drugs, the signal magnitude was dependent upon the drug concentration and combinations of compounds could also be detected, giving a much more detailed picture of a patient’s medication.” – This is great work being done by the University of Illinois. I’ve contemplated something like this in the past.

    SERS_IVdrugID
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  • Anesthesia Check – O.R. syringe labeling and medication tracking system

    Got a chance to see the new Anesthesia Check system from KitCheck while at ASHP Midyear. The system is designed using RFID and bar code technologies to provide safety for syringe labeling in the operating room (OR), as well as chain of custody and waste tracking for all medications used by anesthesia during surgery.
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  • Weighing in on gravimetrics

    I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on i.v. workflow management system. In fact, I’ve been able to spend time observing several of these systems in operation in real healthcare facilities. If you really want to see how something works in a pharmacy spend some time watching a technician work and talking to them about it. You can only learn so much from marketing material, which is, shall we say, less than completely forthcoming with information.

    Each system I’ve reviewed has fundamentally the same concept, but different approaches. One of the most distinct differences I’ve encountered is the inclusion or exclusion of gravimetric analysis during the i.v. compounding process. Some have it, some don’t.
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  • Saturday morning coffee [November 2 2013]

    “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” ― Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals

    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 comes straight from the corporate offices of ScriptPro in Mission, Kansas. I found myself there earlier this week. It’s an impressive place. The ScriptPro campus encompasses several city blocks housing everything from administrative personnel, to warehouses full of ScriptPro hardware, and even research and development. Most of you probably know ScriptPro as the maker of systems for outpatient pharmacy prescription filling, but that’s not all they do. I was surprised to learn that they do a lot lot more, not only in the outpatient space, but in the inpatient space as well. When I first arrived a nice young lady offered me coffee, which I gratefully accepted. During my conversation with the President and CEO of the company, Michael Coughlin, I mentioned that the coffee mug I was using reminded me of a pharmacy mortar. He said “if you like it, keep it”. Now it’s part of the Fahrni coffee mug museum.

    MUG_ScriptPro
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  • Biologists develop new method for discovering antibiotics

    Science Daily: “Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a revolutionary new method for identifying and characterizing antibiotics, an advance that could lead to the discovery of new antibiotics to treat antibiotic resistant bacteria. The researchers made their discovery by developing a way to perform the equivalent of an autopsy on bacterial cells. “This will provide a powerful new tool for identifying compounds that kill bacteria and determining how they work,” said Joseph Pogliano, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team.”” – An “autopsy on bacterial cells”, how cool is that. This is a tremendous discovery as we’ve been slowly losing the war on bacteria for more than a decade. The last time I practiced “clinical pharmacy” was about six years ago and antibiotic resistance was a scary issue back then.

    Journal reference:
    Poochit Nonejuie, Michael Burkart, Kit Pogliano, and Joe Pogliano. Bacterial cytological profiling rapidly identifies the cellular pathways targeted by antibacterial molecules. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1311066110

    superbug

    (Image taken from The Microbiologist, where source is liked to CNN)

  • Medication packaging that expires: the Self Expiring concept

    Medgadget: “Designers Kanupriya Goel and Gautam Goel propose a new design for pill blister packs that will display a message not to take the drugs once enough time passes. The material would consist of two layers, with the top containing the original drug’s info label and a bottom layer with ink that slowly seeps into the top. After enough time passes, the warning message will become clear and the patient will immediately know to get a fresh refill.  The Self Expiring, as the design concept is called, won a 2013 red dot design award.”

    SelfExpiring

    From the reddot design award site: “Self Expiring is a packaging material for medicinal products that visually ‘self expires’ over a fixed period of time. This packaging will graphically display a ‘not fit for consumption’ message using universally accepted danger signs in regional languages. This solution will prevent illegal sales of expired medicines and fatalities arising from their consumption.”

    Great concept. It would be cool if they could take it one step further and have the package analyze the medication inside and “expire” it when the potency goes below a pre-defined percentage. Expiration dates are good, but they don’t always tell the whole story.