Pharmacy Voices

We are moving into the era of personalized medicine — or, to use the new label it has been given, precision medicine. The new emphasis is on a person’s genetic makeup as the basis for tailoring drug therapy for the desired outcome.

The American Society for Automation in Pharmacy (ASAP) recently completed its midyear conference in Louisville. I was delighted to be asked to provide an update on advances in pharmacy data flow between the pharmacy and electronic health record systems.

People fail in their self-care management behaviors (including medication behaviors) for three reasons: (1) they don’t know what to do; (2) they don’t know how to do it; or (3) they are not motivated to do it.

The Government Accountability Office just released its report to Congress on electronic drug labeling, following extensive interviews with a number of industry stakeholders. There was no consensus reached on the advantages of electronic labeling over paper.

Refill synchronization is emerging as a new, innovative service for retail pharmacy. The service coordinates all of a patient’s maintenance prescriptions to be refilled on the same day each month.

The editors of ComputerTalk asked me to take a look at track and trace. I said OK, partly because the California State Board of Pharmacy’s e-pedigree committee had scheduled a meeting about it, and that would give me a chance to see some old friends and maybe even offer an observation or two.

This column and some of my previous ones are going to appear in that book. It’s going to be filled with stories that my wife is tired of hearing but I never tire of telling. One of my idols is Andy Rooney. He was a bit of a curmudgeon who looked at common things from a different and always interesting perspective. I hope that what I write will have some of that character.

Gathering Information for retail pharmacists to be active users, HIEs need to be open to retail pharmacist involvement but pharmacists also share in the responsibility.

Pharmacies are at the forefront in addressing the abuse issue. The early PMPs wanted to know what was being dispensed by pharmacies. Fortunately, the pharmacy management system could be programmed to automatically send the file of controlled substances for the required reporting frequency.

How do you define “quality” in your practice? Might it be measured by the average wait time your customers experience, by the percentage of patients offered additional clinical services, by the hundreds or thousands of prescriptions accurately filled between misfills, by the percentage of patients receiving medication doses outside of recommended doses, or by some other measures ...