Jerry Fahrni

Tag: Social Media

  • Trolling cyberspace for relevant information

    Ours is an age of information. It comes at us from all directions; unrelenting and ever present. Finding information is no longer a problem, figuring out what to do with it and how to handle the never ending stream of information is.

    Cyberspace, i.e. the internet is full of information. It’s available via weblogs, online journals, social media, through professional organizations, via webinars and so on. The problem is that the information has no meaningful structure, making it difficult to sift through. What’s worse is trying to figure out what information is reliable and what information isn’t.

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  • Pharmacy is missing social interaction, face time and comradery

    Being a pharmacist is my first career, but one of many jobs over my lifetime. I was a little late to the party as I spent some time doing other things before jetting off to pharmacy school. One of the things I enjoyed about pharmacy school was the comradery that quickly developed between the students. There were several of us that spent time together learning, studying and becoming better. Our collective minds were simply better than any of us on our own.
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  • Beyond the idea of a medical-alert bracelet with the use of text messaging

    I stumbled across an article in The Wall Street Journal that discusses the use of advancing technologies to improve first responder access to important patient information. Anyone that has a severe allergy or that requires special treatment for a rare or life threatening medical condition is probably aware of medical alert bracelets. Order forms for these trinkets are prevalent in pharmacies across the country. Well it seems that the idea of medical alert bracelets is starting to take on a more technologically advanced edge like everything else in healthcare these days.

    One of the things that caught my eye in the article was the mention of a program called Invisible Bracelet (iB) that utilizes text messaging to retrieve pertinent medical information about a patient, while at the same time notifying the patient’s emergency contact(s). And since I was just talking about using text messaging as a way to improve patient compliance with medications I thought it was worth a closer look.

    “The program, a partnership between Docvia LLC of Tulsa, Okla., and the American Ambulance Association, a trade association, allows members for $10 a year to upload personal medical data to a secure website and receive a personal identification number. Members get cards to place behind their driver’s license, key fobs and stickers that can be put on, say, a bike helmet that show their identification number and the website address.

    The program is currently available in a dozen markets and is expected to expand. Docvia trains ambulance medics to use the system. The website also allows medics to automatically generate text or email messages to designated family members notifying them where the patient is being taken by ambulance.”

    Neat concept.

  • Cool Technology for Pharmacy – CareSpeak

    Texting is a popular method of communication for nearly all walks of life nowadays. I fought the texting bug for a long time until I finally discovered that it was a quick and easy way to communicate with my wife and daughters throughout the day.

    It was only a matter of time before texting made its way into healthcare as a viable option as a way to remind patients to take their medications. Texting has been used to increase medication compliance in certain disease states such as diabetes and pediatric liver transplant. This isn’t the case for all patient demographics as text reminders did not improve compliance with women taking oral contraceptives.

    Nonetheless, the idea of using text messages to encourage patients to take their medication is the goal of CareSpeak and their line of available applications: MediM Alerts, Diabetes Monitor and MediM Alerts+.
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  • Personal vesus professional social media, where’s the line for you?

    Earlier this week @ASHPOfficial tweeted “Where should pharmacists draw the line at social networking? Protect your professional reputation and get tips for safety and privacy in the Summer issue of ASHP InterSections.”  The tweet included a link that took me to Facebook where I found another link to an article in ASHP Intersections Summer 2010 about pharmacy and social media; nothing unusual about that. I’ve read the article before and it contains some pretty good information. With that said, I did find it odd that ASHP was pointing pharmacists toward Facebook to retrieve professional information. It got me thinking about Facebook and where the professional line-in-the-sand between professional and personal social media should be drawn for pharmacists.
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