BMJ YouTube Channel

British Medical Journal has a Youtube channel that is very interesting. (via the ScienceRoll Blog)

In a search I did not see anything on pharmacy or therapeutics.  Anyone?

Clinical Pharmacy Services Save $4.81 on the Dollar

This is from a recent ASHP newsletter.  I find this to be freaking awesome.  Hope to comment on the ones that have informatic implications for even better improvements and ROI.

An evaluation of studies published from 2001 through 2005 found a median savings of $4.81 for every dollar spent on clinical pharmacy services. The savings ranged from $1 to $34.60 per dollar spent.
http://www.pharmacotherapy.org/pdf/free/Pharm2811_Perez-EconEval.pdf

Top articles of 2008

The envelope please..... Based on a completely unscientific, unsubstantiated, nonbinding, and otherwise meaningless poll of a small number of geeks willing to vote on such things --- the winners of the Top Pharmacoinformatic articles of 2008 are (drum roll please):

Workarounds to Barcode Medication Administration Systems: Their Occurrences, Causes, and Threats to Patient Safety doi:10.1197/jamia.M2616

Effectiveness of a Barcode Medication Administration System in Reducing Preventable Adverse Drug Events in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: A Prospective Cohort Study doi:10.1016/j.jpeds.2008.08.025

Severity of medication administration errors detected by a bar-code medication administration system American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, Vol. 65, Issue 17, 1661-1666

The (Slowly) Vanishing Prescription Pad NEJM Volume 359:115-117 July 10, 2008 Number 2

Saving Lives, Saving Money: The Imperative for Computerized Physician Order Entry in Massachusetts Hospitals: Released Feb. 14, 2008 http://www.masstech.org/ehealth/cpoe/cpoe08release.html

Opportunities for Enhancing the FDA Guidance on Pharmacovigilance JAMA. 2008;300(8):952-954 (doi:10.1001/jama.300.8.952)

Drug target identification using side-effect similarity. Science 11 July 2008 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/321/5886/263

UCSF Program Achieves over 56% Reduction in Medication Administration Error http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2008_March_26/ai_n24959258/print?tag=artBody;col1

Improving antibiotic prescribing for adults with community acquired pneumonia: Does a computerised decision support system achieve more than academic detailing alone? http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/8/35

Pharmacy Informatics Syllabi in Doctor of Pharmacy Programs in the US http://www.ajpe.org/view.asp?art=aj720489&pdf=yes

Comments, critiques, kudos, criticisms or cynicisms are welcome and encouraged!

Best of Medicine 2.0 in 2008

Wow have a few days off? Check these out.

From The Scienceroll.com - a terrific blog, fyi. This post lists the best of Medicine 2.0

http://scienceroll.com/2008/12/22/web-20-in-medicine-services-of-2008/

Dean Giustini at UBC Academic Search - Google Scholar Blog created an incredibly useful list of the best web 2.0-based medical services of 2008.

I have a few databases of similar sites:

• Top 10: Virtual Medical Sites in Second Life!
  
• 7 Tips: How to track the information you need!
  
• Medical wikis: the future of medicine?
  
• Community Sites for Scientists and Physicians: The List
  
• What you have to know about Twitter
  
• Sites of Medical/Scientific Videos: The List
  
• Call Your Doctor Online: The Future of Medicine?
  

And hundreds of posts here.
Follow Dean Giustini and Ves Dimov for more.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Medicine 2.0: the beginning of a new era
Free internal medicine case-based education through the World Wide Web
Statbrain.com : traffic estimates for those with no brain
Baidu Shares Fall As Much As 27%

DDI Software and Pharmacists

This study in JAMA documents that 1 in 25 elderly Americans take a potentially harmful combination of medications.  Is this and indictment on the lousy job pharmacists are doing picking up on these combos and how bad the DDI checking software is?

Use of Prescription and Over-the-counter Medications and Dietary Supplements Among Older Adults in the United States
JAMA. 2008; 300:2867-2878.  ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT | PDF

Chemoinformatics

We spent some time defining pharmaco and pharmacy informatics.  Now Chemoinformatics!

This is really interesting from Russ Altman's Blog.

http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/biology-chemistry-bioinformatics-chemoinformatics/

More BCMA Emotion, no science

At the BCMA networking session at the ASHP meeting, the floor was opened up for questions.  So of course, I needed to ask “the ROI question” to the panel that was assembled.

So here is my recollection of my question: Given the current financial situation and the fact that there are no good studies to show the value of BCMA, how do you justify the practice?

The responses where to the effect:

• There is no ROI.  We are doing everything to make the medication administration safe at our hospital, that is what we are all about.
• I put up all of the headlines of the medication administration errors to the Board and then told them a couple of incidence of near misses, and they sucked it up.
• My kids swim team has layers of redundancy in the time keeping; shouldn’t we have protection for medication administration?
• Wouldn’t you want this if your child was in the hospital?
• We have the statistics on near misses that are very impressive.
• Nurses are convinced that it works and would never go back to the old way.

The near miss statistic was uncovered as bogus, in a later story of how nurses have all of the insulin stickers on the back of their badges and scan until they get a correct scan.  Where, presumably each scan is logged as a near miss.

I could not help think of what my old room mate taught me with example after example of selling cars.  People buy with emotion and justify with logic.  I clearly heard lots of emotion from the panel.  They where making emotional arguments and justifying the practice with logic, devoid of any science.

Excuse me, but isn’t pharmacy a scientific profession.  Shouldn’t we have a scientific explanation for BCMA as a practice.

The science behind unit dose distribution was marvelous.  Yet, we continue to make emotional pleas for BCMA. 

This will not hold up over time, we need more science or we are toast.

Twitter for Health presentation

Anyone on Twitter?  It is very cool.  Well, let me just say I am still attempting to find the ‘sweat spot’ for the use of this technology.  This PPT helps.

My twitter name is “poikonen” if anyone dives in.

| View | Upload your own

This is via the blog  http://healthinformaticsblog.com/