GAME ON! It's About Medication Adherence and I'm Helping Myself® As a practicing pharmacist, my days are already stretched. Another eight hours please® probably explains it best. Yet with the recent re-challenge proposed by the "A3".... the Adherence Action Agenda... offered by the National Council on Patient Information and Education (NCPIE), we've been challenged as pharmacists to do more...much more. Read more
DOSIS: An Advanced Pharmacy Automation Dispensing System What's a DOSIS? In ancient times, the Greeks used the term dosis to describe "a measured dose of medicine". Do you recall this term while reading Homer's Odyssey or Aristotle's writings on Economics (one of his 23 volumes translated and published in 1935 by the Harvard University Press)? Read more
Isn’t It Funny How Times Change…Or Is It? Walter Hughes, Jan Smith and James Martin of the Sadler-Hughes Apothecary in Clinton, SC have seen it all in the past 10 years. As pharmacists, they have adjusted to the regular challenges offered by new national agendas for patient medication adherence, rising generic drug prices, preferred generic medication pricing available to mail order pharmacies, slowness for current pharmacy benefit manager “PBM” pricing remuneration and the increase in demand for shareable patient-centric health data and mobile access to pharmacy services. Who here remembers pharmacy 10 years ago? How about 50 years ago? Read more
1.8 Billion New Prescriptions in 2014 Are you ready? With the Affordable Health Care Act apparently taking hold here in October of 2013, this isn’t just another Fall with early leaves falling and insurances beginning to change for many of our Medicare customers. I’ve mentioned in earlier articles that I dream a lot. My last dream was actually more like a nightmare. Consider the following thoughts. I sense it may even be a pharmacy workflowTidal Wave of challenges to many of the many pharmacy operations for which I consult. 1.8 Billion new prescriptions possible in 2014! Oh, my… Read more
Kudos! A New Pharmacy Workflow Enhancement Kudos to the Integral Solutions Group in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Their new ScriptChek® vial label and receipt is a long needed improvement to our traditional wrap around vial label and corresponding receipt. Does the label you currently print always seem to be too small to fit those deliciously complicated directions written by some practitioners? Would you agree? I like to think of this new design ScriptChek® label as “smart”. Read more
Many Information-Based Technologies Can Effect Patient Engagement and Adherence Located on the main floor of the full service Redfern Health Center Clinic is the Redfern Pharmacy. With an automated dispensing system, this pharmacy fills approximately 40 prescriptions per hour for a unique population...college students...attending Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. Read more
Do Pharmacies Have Hidden ROI? Successful pharmacy operations know this to be true. Recovery of hidden ROI (return on investment) can be accelerated through use of highly integrated workflow software combined with automated counting or dispensing systems. All pharmacies utilize pharmacy management systems today. Oft times, when automated equipment is used in the daily workflow, third party interfaces and workflow software are purchased separately to potentially increase efficiencies. Read more
Automated Pharmacy Dispensing is Integral to Our Business Model Kelly Hunt, RPh, a pharmacist-owner of Kelly's Family Pharmacy has an answer to the question "what might pharmacists do with time". Read more