TeleMedicine and Virtual Care

Mercy is a large health care system covering 4 midwestern states, they have recently announced that they are planning on opening a virtual care center Chesterfield, MO which is near their headquarters. This virtual care center comes at a pretty penny. It will be a $90 million dollar facility and Mercy is also pumping $590 million into the technologies and network needed to get the virtual center up and running. The grand opening is scheduled for spring 2014. This facility will house hundreds of doctors and nurses that will be linked to Mercy hospitals, clinics and centers via telemedicine technologies.

 This virtual center will house existing and future tele-programs. These programs range from telehealth, telestroke, teleradiology, telepathology to remote disease management and primary care support. Another interesting aspect of this virtual center is SafeWatch, which is an electronic intensive care unit where doctors monitor over 400 beds at 10 hospitals across Mercy's network all from a St. Louis hub.


CMIO - Article

Disco pill bottles?

 The beauty of technology is that it allows people from various disciplines of life to capitalize on such innovations for the purpose of improving something. There are currently about a dozen pharmaceutical companies that are using new Wi-Fi bottles to help improve medication adherence. No these bottles don't allow you to surf google or play youtube videos, but they do light-up, play melodies, can send alert text messages and even transmit automatic refill requests to your local pharmacy. Data from the smart bottles can be transmitted and tracked by the patient, physician, pharmacist and caregiver in order to keep track of patient compliance and adherence. It is estimated that for every $1 spent on smart bottles, $4 is created in increased sales/revenue. It works for any medication that costs around $4 or more per day. A study at Harvard showed that such technology has improved compliance by 25% on average. I guess if you're gonna take medicine, you might as well make it a bit fun and entertaining while your doing it.

Drug Topics - Article

Health Apps, Surveys, Confusion...

According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Centers' Internet & American Life Project in August 2011, about 11% of U.S. adult cell phone users downloaded an App that "helped them track or manage their health." Pew Research has been tracking this adult population for a year now and they recorded a 2% increase from 9% in September 2010 to 11% in August 2011....insignificant increase in their books.

So what is the issue? The issue arises in the way Pew conducted the 2 surveys. "In August 2011, the question was asked of adults who have downloaded an app to a cell phone or tablet computer, rather than all cell phone users." 29% of this population reported downloading a health app, but when looking at just adults who download apps to a cell phone, this number ends up being 11%.

Overall, the survey showed an increase from 22% in September 2009 to 38% in August 2011 for adult cell phone owners who have downloaded any type of app to their phone. Don't you just love statistics and survey's? It seems like you can make them say or not say whatever you want. 


Drug Topics - Article

What does Carbon and Diabetes have in common?

Talk about the future? It looks like scientists at Purdue University have developed some pretty wild and innovative biotechnology. "Purdue University scientists have developed a method for stacking synthetic DNA and carbon nanotubes onto a biosensor electrode, a development that may lead to more accurate measurements for research related to diabetes and other diseases."


Carbon nanotubes have been found to have much better thermal and electrical properties versus the standard materials currently used for biosensors. This newly developed super biosensor could be used for diabetes and insulin management in diabetic patients. Such technology can easily pave the way for biosensors that can be used for patient specific purposes and track in real-time the effectiveness of drugs on their targets in the body. It seems like nano technology is continuing to progress and is certainly the science of the future.

Medical News Today - Article

e-Prescribing, I need more e-prescribing

To steal a line from Saturday Night Live and the great Christopher Walken; "Cowbell, I need more cowbell!" That's pretty much how I feel when it comes to e-prescribing and it's positive impacts on health care and more specifically, pharmacy. For those of us who work at a retail pharmacy, we all know how much of a headache it is having to handle and process oftentimes hundreds of prescriptions a day, especially when the majority of them are illegible works of art. Something as simple as one illegible prescription can throw a monkey wrench into your workflow, especially when your short staffed and juggling 100 balls at the same time. Having to stop one process to call a doctor for clarification on a prescription can be quite annoying, especially when you're put on hold. Since e-prescriptions still make up a small portion of our daily script counts, most of us will be living with these tedious headaches for a little longer.


So what exactly is e-prescribing? Simply put, it's an electronic way to generate prescriptions through an automated data-entry process. This process utilizes specific software and a transmission network which links the physician to the pharmacies. E-prescribing has been described as a vital solution to helping to improve patient safety and reduce our ever sky-rocketing medication costs. It is estimated that roughly 7,000 patients die a year in the U.S due to medication errors, with a large portion of such errors due to poorly written prescriptions and missed drug-drug interactions. This is just a complete unnecessary risk and using hand-written paper based methods for such vital information is primitive in my mind.

To better understand the impact of e-prescribing, let's break down it's impact on health care:

1) Improves patient safety and overall quality of care by eliminating errors associated with illegible prescriptions.
2) E-prescribing systems have built in DUR warning/alert systems that can immediately detect drug-drug interactions, allergic reactions, contraindications, duplicate therapies, etc.
3) Software has the ability to sync patient medical records and alert for any drug inappropriatness.
4) Huge reduction in pharmacy phone calls to physician and call-backs. It is estimated that out of the 3 billion prescriptions a year, 30% of those result in a pharmacy contacted the physician for clarification of some sort. This equates to massive amounts of wasted time and energy on the part of the physician as well as the pharmacy.
5) Eliminate faxes to pharmacies
6) Streamline refill requests and authorization processes. We all know how utterly mind-numbing this process is and how it affects patient satisfaction and medication adherence.
7) The provider has absolute mobility to authorize prescriptions anytime and anywhere using e-prescribing software.
8) Overall flexibility, convenience and cost savings is a no-brainer.

We have the technology to achieve all of this, unfortunately it's a matter of integrating and expanding the e-prescribing services into every provider across the country. Most providers have yet to adopt e-prescribing, until they do, the pharmacy and most importantly the patient will be feeling the burden.


http://www.emrconsultant.com/education/e-prescribing

Robots killed the Pharmacist role?

We are all familiar with the song: "Video killed the Radio Star", it's a catchy tune and also a factual statement. Very unfortunate for all the "radio stars" that were weeded out by the emergence of video....but this is just a product of technology, societal advancements and competition. It happens, and no profession or job will be immune to such changes. Not to say all professions or jobs will be eliminated, but they will surely see some sort of dramatic fundamental changes as we barrel ahead into the future of technological advancements. As a current pharmacy student, I can't help but seeing all the warning signs of dramatic fundamental changes that are occurring within the profession of Pharmacy as we speak.

I stumbled upon this article by MSNBC titled, "Nine jobs that humans may lose", and it got me thinking about the traditional role of the Pharmacist as a dispenser of medication first, and an active patient-centered health practitioner second. Surely paying a pharmacist six-figures and above to merely dispense pills is not an effective or efficient use of our knowledge, training and expertise. Nor does it make a lot of sense financially to a company's bottom-line and business model. One institution and business has taken a real hard look at this situation and has implemented a real life solution by creating two fully robotic pharmacies. The UCSF Medical Center has implemented these fully operational all robotic pharmacies at their hospitals in Parnassus and Mount Zion. The goal: to make the complete operation of dispensing medication robotic, eliminate human-made medication errors, and free up the Pharmacists and Nurses to focus on direct patient care.

I think this sounds quite interesting, I'm hopeful it can be a launching pad to promote the Pharmacist as a "real" health care practitioner on par with a Doctor, etc. But for many others, this may be a very gloomy revelation and they may feel like their profession is under attack by robots. That's the biggest problem within our Pharmacy profession, the division of where we stand regarding our role in the Health Care system and our inability to advance our profession based upon our expertise and clinical knowledge. So many pharmacists want to remain hidden behind the counter, they want limited patient interaction and they merely want to count, lick, stick and pour meds all day. Unfortunately, this model of pharmacy is akin to the radio star...and technology is proving that those tasks can be done for a fraction of the cost all the while eliminating med errors and increasing patient safety.

So, what will the future of pharmacy look like? What will the role of the Pharmacist be in tomorrow's health care system? That's up to all of us in the pharmacy profession. Will we embrace the role of technology? Will we resist change? We are at a very critical moment in the profession of Pharmacy, the role we play is being greatly debated and is and will likely dramatically change. It doesn't matter if we work at a hospital or retail chain, the changes are happening all around. Maybe Pharmacy Informatics is the wave of the future?

Guess who's back...?

As you may have noticed from my previous posts, it has been quite a while since I've last blogged....a little over 2 years as a matter of fact. I originally created Tony's CORNERx while I was pursuing my Bachelor's degree in Health Care Administration at the University of Central Florida; as part of an assignment for a class. Long behold, I will once again be blogging on Tony's CORNERx; this time as part of an assignment for my Consumer Health Informatics/Web2.0 class at Nova Southeastern University. For those of you who don't know, I have moved on to "bigger and better things" one would say. I have made the move from Orlando to Wellington, Florida, and I am currently in my second year of Pharmacy School as a Doctor of Pharmacy Student at NSU-Palm Beach Gardens campus. Things are going well, no complaints from this guy.

So, you might be asking yourself, what is Consumer Health Informatics/Web2.0? Prior to entering pharmacy school, I had the same question. With a little research and digging around, I've realized it's everything we've come to embrace as a society: facebook, twitter, ipad, smartphones, etc, etc.....only applied to the medical and healthcare realm. With that said, over the next 2 months I will be providing you all with information, ideas, thoughts and insight into Consumer Health Informatics/Web2.0 from the perspective of a pharmacy student.