Reference

I received an email this morning from Medscape introducing me to their new Pill Identifier Tool.

The tool is pretty simple to use. When you click on the link above you’ll be taken to the Pill Identifier Tool site where you can begin your search. Any pharmacist, nurse, or physician that’s ever used a reference to identify an oral medication will be familiar with the process.

Across the top of the Pill Identifier you will find several fields to help narrow your search: IMPRINT, SHAPE, COLOR, FORM, SCORING. I’ve always found that if you have the imprint you’re about 80% there.

Clicking on a medication will give you additional information. There’s even an option to view the Drug Monograph.

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Beyond use dating (BUD) is a bit of a hassle in acute care practice. The reason is that regulatory bodies have muddied the water with information that isn’t always the most recent or evidence based. ISMP recently published information from a survey of 715 pharmacy professionals on drug storage, stability, and beyond use dating of injectable drugs, and the results are a bit disappointing. There’s clearly a lot of confusion out there, in addition to a plethora of different practice models.

For me the reference of choice for stability, storage and compatibility was always the Handbook on Injectable Drugs, now in its 16th Edition. This reference was affectionately known as “Trissel’s” because the author of the book Lawrence A. Trissel is a legend in the field of injectable drugs. After Trissel’s I’d do a literature search to see if I could find something that wasn’t in there; typically I couldn’t. And finally, if I couldn’t find it in Trissels’s or the literature, I’d look at the manufacturer’s information.

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