Jerry Fahrni

Tag: Pharmacy Technology

  • MedVantx launches medication adherence program

    EMR Daily News:

    MedVantx, Inc., has announced the deployment of its patent pending Patient Profile™ patient medication and adherence reporting engine across its network of 3,600 high prescribing primary care providers participating in the Company’s integrated program of initial free medication therapy, adherence management and home delivery program. This new program utilizes the Company’s proprietary automated ATM like sample management system (“MedStart™“) and an integrated secure web reporting portal to provide physicians visibility to their patients’ adherence to chronic medication therapy…

    The MedStart™ system automates the traditional sampling process for the physician; captures physician sampling data for inclusion in the patients’ claims history medical record and provides consumers access to highly relevant drug and disease state educational materials. Since patients don’t always get prescriptions filled, physicians can enhance adherence by providing their patients with initial therapy and better informational tools to manage their conditions right from the office…

     

    Now with the availability of the MedVantx Patient Profile™, physicians are able to view data about how patients, on an individual basis, are complying with their prescribed medication treatments.  By showing exactly when a patient fills prescriptions, physicians can detect late refills, gaps in medication fulfillment, discontinued treatments and more to accurately access and improve patient compliance.

    Interesting concept. I often wonder if simply getting rid of chain and grocery store pharmacies, and going back to neighborhood community practices would be the best way to improve patient medication compliance. I’ve worked in chain, grocery store and community pharmacies and have always felt that the small community practice knows their patients best and provides the best patient care when it comes to medication management. Something to think about anyway.

    More on the system mentioned above can be found at the MedVantx website.

  • Model for scheduling complex medication regimens

    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 schedule for individual patients is a promising idea. (Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2011 Dec;104(3):514-9. Epub 2011 Oct 5.)

     

    Abstract
    Medication adherence tends to affect the recovery of patients. Patients having poor medication adherence show a worsening of their condition and/or increased complications. Unfortunately, between 20% and 50% of chronic patients are unable to manage their medications. This study proposes a model to improve the patients’ medication compliance by reducing medication frequency.

    Published studies have shown that, based on the patients’ lifestyle, simplification of the medication frequency and remodeling of the medication schedule is able to help improve medication adherence. Therefore, this study tried to simplify medication frequency by combining therapies. Moreover, by adjusting according to lifestyle, the study also tries to remodel medication timing in relation to mealtimes to create personal medication schedules.

    In this study, we used 19,393,452 outpatient prescriptions from the National Health Insurance Research Database to verify our system (algorithm optimized). At the same time, we examined the differences between the frequency summarized by general public and experts’ advice medication behavior. Compared with the experts’ advice method, this system has reduced the medication frequency in about 49% of prescriptions.

    Using combined medication to simplify medication frequency is able to reduce the medication frequency significantly and improve medication adherence. Furthermore, this should also improve patient recovery, reduce drug hazards and result in less drug wastage.

  • Cool Technology for Pharmacy – PharmASSIST OPTIx

    ThomasNet News: “PharmASSIST OPTIx enables remote prescription verification by taking a high-resolution image of each prescription’s vial contents and vial label, and automatically displaying them on a designated pharmacist’s workstation. The pharmacist compares these images to the appropriate drug image from a standardized drug database, along with specific prescription details to complete the verification. The verifying pharmacist can be stationed anywhere – in the front of the pharmacy counseling patients or offsite at another pharmacy, a central processing center, or working from a home office. PharmASSIST OPTIx stores each prescription’s images as part of the patient history record, enabling pharmacies to quickly retrieve them for pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) audits and to confirm the quantity dispensed.

    Pharmacies can use PharmASSIST OPTIx in stand-alone mode or integrated with Innovation’s PharmASSIST Symphony® workflow systems, which enables end-to-end prescription tracking, problem management, and reporting. In addition to processing a pharmacy’s countable medications, PharmASSIST OPTIx handles all non-countable products (e.g., ointments/creams, liquids, syringes, inhalers, etc.) for prescription filling and remote verification. The system can also assist pharmacies with physical inventory control.”

    It reminds me of a non-cleanroom version of DoseEdge.

    Additional automation is needed for it to be a real game changer, but it’s still pretty cool technology. It would be slick if the person filling the prescription never had to touch the product and the end result could be remotely verified.

    Product website here.

    OPTIx brochure (PDF).

  • The weakest link in building a safer medication use model

    I’ve just spent four days at the ASHP Summer Meeting in Denver, CO. The meeting offered a nice variety of topics, but seemed to focus on medication safety and informatics more this year than in the past. In fact, this is the first year that ASHP has offered a medication safety tract at one of their meetings.

    I avoided the more traditional sessions on therapeutics, choosing instead to focus on the informatics and medication safety sessions. Based on the information presented it was obvious to me that these two disciplines are intimately linked. After all, the idea behind much of the technology we use in healthcare today is to improve patient safety.
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  • Technology and pharmacist impact on medication adherence

    mobihealthnews: “According to a recent study by Express Scripts, Americans might be wasting as much as $258 billion annually by not taking their prescribed medications. Missed doses can lead to emergency room visits and doctors’ visits, which could be prevented if medication adherence was improved. The Express Scripts study found that more than half of people who believe they take their medications properly are not, according to a report in USA Today.

    A similar study conducted by NEHI found that poor medication adherence results in illnesses and ensuing treatments that cost some $290 billion in unnecessary spending each year, $100 billion of that in avoidable hospitalizations alone.

    Two members of Congress recently introduced bills to allow Medicare reimbursement for more patients to sit down with therapists one-on-one and equip patients with pill boxes or text message services that help patients become more adherent, the USA Today report said.

    The Toronto University College of Pharmacy conducted a study that found medication therapy saved about $93.78 per patient annually in a study of 23,798 people, USA Today reports.”
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  • Do larger hospitals have an edge? Maybe

    I’ve worked in several hospitals over the course of my career, ranging in size from 25 acute care beds to nearly 600 (584 beds to be exact). While 600 beds isn’t a large hospital, it certainly isn’t small. Regardless of the size of the hospital I’ve worked in, the operations inside the walls of the pharmacy are strikingly similar, including from the way pharmacists process orders to the way technicians handle distribution. There are differences to be sure, but the basics are the same. Differences to note include clinical services and use of automation and technology.
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  • The ever expanding role of pharmacists

    Lately I’ve found myself thinking about how pharmacists are involved in healthcare. Despite popular belief pharmacists do more than simply work in the pharmacy.

    Throughout my career I’ve become accustomed to people viewing pharmacists as the stereotypically person behind the counter at the drug store “counting pills”. While that’s not all pharmacists do, I’ve learned to live with the general publics simplistic view. I don’t think most people realize that pharmacists are involved in every aspect of a patient’s care. If you’ve ever been in a hospital, received a prescription medication, had a loved one in a long term care facility, received intravenous medications at home like total parenteral nutrition (TPN) or antibiotics, received an albumin or intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusion in an outpatient infusion center or met with a pharmacist in a clinic setting for a medication therapy management (MTM) session, then you’ve been touched by a pharmacist.
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  • Where will automation and technology make the biggest impact in pharmacy?

    I was planning on writing a rant this morning about lack of motivation, leadership and dumbasses – hey, I was in a fould mood when I got up – but then I opened an email from a friend. He asked me “How can retail pharmacists get involved in this [pharmacy informatics] industry?”. My first thought was to say that retail pharmacy would be the death of our profession and that they have no business getting involved in pharmacy informatics. Harsh I know, but I told you I was in a foul mood.

    Then I did something I rarely do, I thought about the question a bit more before answering. After some time I came to the conclusion that retail, or more generally outpatient, pharmacy is exactly where more automation and technology is needed. I follow a few retail pharmacists on Twitter and one generalization I can make from reading their Tweets is that they all pretty much hate their jobs. Why? Because they spend precious little time working as pharmacists, instead spending most of their time physically filling prescriptions, chasing insurance claims, etc.

    What retail pharmacy needs is a super-sized dose of pharmacy automation, technology and greater pharmacy technician involvement. Nowhere in pharmacy is there a greater need for automation and technology than outpatient services. Much of what’s done in the outpatient pharmacy setting does not require a pharmacist. This echoes the words by Chad Hardy last week on the RxInformatics website. Chad states “The longer we rely on pharmacists to run the entire supply chain, the higher our risk of obsolescence.” He’s absolutely right, although the article he references insinuates that pharmacists will become obsolete secondary to technology. Nay, I say. Technology in the outpatient arena can offer pharmacists the opportunity to break away from the mundane and do a little more hands on patient care. In addition, the drive to implement automation and technology in the retail setting creates the perfect job opportunity for pharmacists interested in informatics.

    Of course we’ll have to prove to the retail boys upstairs that they can save money by using pharmacists in a more clinical role, but that’s what business cases are for. Unfortunately I couldn’t write a business case to save my life. In fact, a colleague of mine told me that pharmacists are terrible at creating business cases. I suppose that’s true as most of us didn’t become pharmacists to practice business. Instead we became pharmacists to provide patient care. Go figure.

  • How not to design an application for pharmacy

    I’ve used Pyxis PARx before, but only in combination with a carousel storage system. I recently had the opportunity to play with the standalone version of PARx and all I have to say is yikes!

    The system utilizes an older version of Windows Mobile on a clunky Motorola handheld. To get from log-in to a useful place in the application required me to go through no less than four screens. The touch screen was unresponsive and difficult to use, the device was painfully slow and the connectivity was lacking.

    So, to sum up my experience with PARx – used with carousel technology it’s great, but try to use the standalone product and you might find yourself spewing profanity.

     

  • Cool pharmacy technology – UCSF Robotics

    UCSF: “Although it won’t be obvious to UCSF Medical Center patients, behind the scenes a family of giant robots now counts and processes their medications. With a new automated hospital pharmacy, believed to be the nation’s most comprehensive, UCSF is using robotic technology and electronics to prepare and track medications with the goal of improving patient safety.

    Not a single error has occurred in the 350,000 doses of medication prepared during the system’s recent phase in.”

    Robotics is nothing new, but it seems like everyone is taking notice of the new robotics in the pharmacy at UCSF. I suppose all the people pointing it out to me has something to do with the fact that UCSF School of Pharmacy is my alma mater, but you never know. Anyway, I’m pleasantly surprised to see UCSF taking such an active role in advancing pharmacy practice. When I spoke with some colleagues sill working for UCSF a little over a year ago they were still practicing pharmacy invented in the dark ages. Not any more.

    Now I’m trying to get a hold of someone at UCSF that will let me stop by for a tour, and all of a sudden no one knows me. Poetic justice I suppose.