RxInformatics.com

John's wonderful post on the Peripheral Brain sent on a quest to find tools to organize my life.  I spent a few hours this weekend looking over Springpad, and decided it is not ideal for those that manage documents.  At least for me, I am still getting the majority of my information in a document format.  Springpad is fantastic if you spend lots of time on the Internet, and if most of your cataloging comes from web pages.  In the Informatics world many of our articles and references are not mainstream (or behind a password protected site) so this makes it hard to conveniently add all articles in Springpad.  This coupled with the inability to add multiple documents to one "Spring", and one can see where it quickly falls behind. 

It seems as though Springpad might be good for someone that works in a smaller more amoebic type office, or one that deals with mostly internet based business relationships. 

  Springpad

I started this site for a series of talks on the pharmacist and meaningful use.  I will continue to maintain and send focused material on pharmacy practice and meaningful use to this site.  http://mu4pharm.posterous.com/  

Here is what they get completely mixed up.  They cite Savario Maviglia's study as evidence of  "A study done to evaluate cost-benefit of eMAR".  Yet this study is not even about eMAR!  It is about tracking medication through the dispensing process in the pharmacy, not for electronic medication administration.  I put together a panel on technology and pharmacy practice at the ASHP Midyear meeting with Dr. Maviglia in explaining this practice.  This practice of tracking medications through the dispensing process in the pharmacy has more evidence to decrease errors than BCMA does.  Eric Poon tells me that a paper on the cost effectiveness of BCMA is in the works.  I will look forward to that.

Formal comments to the ONC will follow.  What say you.

http://www.symplur.com/blog/himss12-world-record-healthcare-conferenes/

See this link for an amazing set of Twitter stats on the HIMSS meeting. Really impressive.

Posted via email from RxDoc.Org

At the Am Medical Informatics Association meeting in Nov 2011, I had the pleasure of meeting Yohan Lee, PhD, an energetic and knowledgeable genomic researcher.  We had a conversation on some general principles on pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics via Skype recently.  Here is a podcast of that conversation.

Posted via email from RxDoc.Org

It seems that this is the year of usability in medical applications.  There are lots of studies and examples of how better usability impacts patient care and workflow.   A couple of years ago Allen Flynn from the Univ of Michigan Hospitals and pharmacy informatics extraordinaire, presented this concept of a pharmacy profile, a la iTunes.  This is awesome and a classic.  Thanks to Allen Flynn for allowing to share his brilliant ideas.   A pdf of the entire iTunes pharmacy profile is attached.

Fifty Usability Ideas for Pharmacy inspired by iTunes

1. Pharmacy Department’s on-screen message box

2. Patient selection via Venue -> Unit -> Name

3. Updating counts of orders to be verified in parenthesis (y)

4. Drug information summary box updated for current drug
5. Contextual hyperlinks to drug info databases as buttons

6. On-screen clock

7. Large name panel with age, sex, weight, CrCL

While we disagree on the value and integrity of ASHP, I agree with everything in this speech.  He is an unbelievable pioneer and innovator in pharmacy informatics.  Congratulations to Dennis!

Posted via email from RxDoc.Org

Posted via email from RxDoc.Org

The cleanroom environment, a.k.a. the IV room, is one of my favorite areas inside an acute care pharmacy. It is often alive with activity, and can often be the busiest area of the pharmacy. It is also a unique place since the use of intravenous (IV) medications is vital to the successful outcomes of patients, but at the same time can result in some of the most egregious errors in healthcare. While the IV compounding process is under tight control as demanded by USP guidelines, the method of preparation and distribution is decidedly more conventional, i.e. IV rooms often rely heavily on humans. It’s an interesting dichotomy found nowhere else in the pharmacy. It is for these reasons that I find it interesting that pharmacy IV rooms have lagged behind other areas of pharmacy operations in automation and technology.

However, that’s beginning to change. Pharmacy IV rooms are no longer overlooked when implementing innovative technologies. As pharmacy operations continue to evolve it is becoming clear that IV rooms are starting to receive their due respect.

A certain percentage of healthcare systems already utilize some form of technology in the IV room, however the numbers are small. A 2007 ASHP national survey on informatics found that, depending on number of beds, between 9% and 27% of facilities were utilizing some form of device in sterile product preparation¹ (small-volume and large-volume parenterals). It is unknown what technologies these facilities were utilizing at the time of the survey.