Pharmacy Informatics

Calling all students and professionals with an entrepreneurial spirit!

by

Here’s something special happening in the local Fresno area…. Calling all students and professionals with an entrepreneurial spirit! We’d like to invite you to join our new FREE HealthTech Initiative course. Find out more about this exciting class that will help develop healthcare products and services here: CHSU.ORG/HEALTHTECH-INITIATIVE We are looking for individuals to join … Read more

UPMC pilots pharmacogenomics program for heart patients

by

Twenty years ago pharmacogenomics was supposed to revolutionize the way we practice pharmacy. Unfortunately, the revolution has been slow to evolve. That’s why this pilot program at UPMC is so exciting. UPMC is piloting a program to perform genetic testing on patients to determine medication response. “At UPMC, doctors are testing for that gene before … Read more

In the Clean Room: A Review of Technology-Assisted Sterile Compounding Systems in the US [report]

by

For the better part of the past year I’ve been working on a project with Mark Neuenschwander of The Neuenschwander Company looking at technologies used in pharmacy clean rooms to prepare sterile compounds.

The research into this area took much longer than originally anticipated. We discovered along the way that this subject is much more complex than it appears on the surface. Information is difficult to find, some of the technologies are little more than marketing material on a company website, and the subject matter is in its infancy.

Read more

Is pharmacy informatics defined well enough to be a specialty?

by

Pharmacy informatics remains in its infancy as a profession. What started out as a job for tech-savvy pharmacists with working knowledge of pharmacy has turned into an ever expanding career field. I’m looking through the ASHP Summer Meeting Informatics Institute schedule and the topics are varied. I see something on human factors, information management, clinical … Read more

Great Prezi on Evidence Based Health Informatics

by

Thanks to Tim Cook over at Google+ for the lead on this one. I’m familiar with Prezi’s, but have never created one. I played around with the technology once, quickly became frustrated, and gave up. Anyway, the Prezi below from Dr. Robert Hoyt - Evidence Based Health Informatics » Replacing Hype with Science – has a lot of … Read more

Reviewing an #archetype

by

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but you know how things go.

While at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas last month I was asked to do a little review work. That’s not all that uncommon. People ask me to do things on occasion; review a blog post, review an app, give my opinion on something and so on. But this was completely different as Dr. Heather Leslie (@omowizzrd), Director of Clinical Modeling for Ocean Informatics and Editor for the openEHR Clinical Knowledge Manager asked me to review an archetype. A what? Yeah, that was my response when Heather and I first spoke about the topic nearly two years ago.

According to good ol’ Merriam-Webster an archetype is “the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies: also : a perfect example“. Simple enough, but still too vague for my brain so I went in search of a better explanation which I found at Heather’s blog – Archetypical.

Read more

#HIMSS12 Day 3

by

Actually Day 3 was yesterday, but I’m just now getting around to putting some thoughts on paper. Best session I attended was Care Coordination in Practice: Managing Data Volume and Data Reconciliation. The presentation was all about big data and how we’re failing to use it appropriately in healthcare. The slide deck was great. It’s … Read more

Digital edition of U.S. Pharmacist off to a bad start

by

I received the announcement below in my email just a short time ago. So being the good little pharmacist that I am, I headed on over to the U.S. Pharmacist website to check it out. Imagine my surprise when I clicked on the digital issue link and was greeted with a “Service Unavailable” message (bottom image). Bummer. Hopefully they’ll get it up and running shortly.

Update: Looks like they got it working within 5 minutes of me posting this. It’s a nice format. Check it out for yourself here.

Read more

Model for scheduling complex medication regimens

by

The abstract below caught my attention. I can’t read the entire article because I don’t have a subscription to the journal (a pet peeve of mine – just sayin’). Nonetheless I found the abstract quite interesting. I think the conclusion is a bit overly optimistic, but the use of computers to calculate an optimized medication … Read more