From January 2020 until March of 2022, I was one of two inpatient pharmacy supervisors at Community Regional Medical Center (CRMC) in Fresno, California. CRMC is a big level one trauma center. They have about every imaginable service, minus only bone marrow and solid-organ transplants. The pharmacy is large and busy. The size and complexity … Read more
Pulling another article from the notebook archive, penned March 20, 2020. I have seen the future of IV workflow management systems (IVWFMS). Spoiler alert, EPIC wins. And before people start calling me an Epic fanboy, I should make it clear that I do not like Epic, as a company or a product. I believe healthcare … Read more
I saw the discussion below in one of the pharmacy forums. Fact check true on this one. Gilead would have everyone believe that remdesivir is a magic bullet for COVID-19 infection. Not true. Helpful? Useful tool? Maybe. Remdesivir, while potentially beneficial, has limitations. For one, it should only be used on hospitalized patients that have … Read more
What’s a 503B FDA outsourcing facility? Well, just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship…. just kidding, it’s what popped into my head when I started writing, but we really should define what a 503B is. The 503B … Read more
Quite some time ago I took to writing things down in a paper rather than digital notebook. This morning, as people will do when they are bored, I picked up one of those notebooks and began thumbing through the pages. Not too far in, I came across some notes dated Sunday, April 5, 2020 that … Read more
COVID-19 has taught us many things, among them that our healthcare supply chain is poorly designed and flimsy. Just a few weeks into the pandemic and our supply chain for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has been completely disrupted. PPE is now in short supply, and I suspect that we will run out of PPE in … Read more
I’ve been slowly reading ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, a best-selling book by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. The book summarizes behavioral science research conducted by Kahneman. The recurring theme of the book is what the author defines as two modes … Read more
Full disclosure, anyone reading this should take it with a grain of salt. I used to work for Talyst as a product manager for their acute care product line, and I’ve recently been involved with a Pyxis Logistics implementation. With that said, forward. In short, yes, BD Pyxis Logistics (“Logistics) is quite good. BD is … Read more
Several years ago, shortly after I was let go from Talyst, I found myself with some free time on my hands. I started writing a book. The book was titled ‘Making the right choice: Helping pharmacies make smart decisions about automation and technology’. Like many books I’ve started, it remains unfinished. I don’t think I’ve … Read more
There was an interesting thread in one of the ASHP practice forums recently. Someone asked whether or not pharmacists were “ready for the future that the opportunities these disruptive technologies offerâ€. This in reference to technologies that they saw in the exhibit hall at ASHP Midyear. The simple answer is no. Pharmacists are barely ready … Read more