Author: Peter

PTCB (Pharmacy Technician Certification Board) invites you (certified pharmacy technicians) to vote now for the 2015 PTCB CPhT of the Year. PTCB's CPhT of the Year Program honors and recognizes individual achievement in patient care, leadership, and innovation to encourage and support excellence among all pharmacy technicians….PTCB selected eight CPhT candidates to appear on the online ballot.
The 2015 honoree will receive:

• a $1,000 honorarium
• travel and accommodations to attend a special evening event on October 27, 2015 in Washington, DC to recognize the CPhT of the Year for leadership, innovation, and excellence in patient safety, and to celebrate PTCB's 20th anniversary

Pat Basu, MD, MBA, chief medical officer of Doctor on Demand, discusses how community pharmacists can best leverage EHR technology.

Pfizer's stop-smoking drug Chantix (varenicline) does not raise risks of heart attack or depression, contrary to previous reports, and should be recommended to more smokers wanting to quit, scientists said…researchers found that patients who took Chantix,..marketed as Champix in Europe, were no more likely to suffer a heart attack than those using nicotine replacement therapy or another quit-smoking drug…also not at higher risk of depression or self-harm...

Medical Journal of Australia today confirms the potential for community pharmacies to make a significant contribution to reducing the cost of unnecessary hospitalisations…study conducted by researchers at the University of South Australia and the BUPA Health Foundation shows that as many as one in four older hospital patients could have avoided admission had their medication and health risks been better managed…. a quarter of hospital admissions were preceded by ‘sub-optimal care’, with up to $300 million being spent per year to treat elderly patients who were not on the correct drug regime.

A Las Vegas doc rocks, mocks and thinks outside the (pill) box..ZDoggMD’s music videos....are kind of homemade and the backup crew looks like those guys in scrubs hanging out around the hospital nurses’ station. Oh, wait, they are the guys in scrubs....ZDogg is Zubin Damania, a Stanford-trained doctor with a clinical practice called Turntable Health in Las Vegas and a stated goal of developing better models of patient care...he’s also been doing parodies of pop music videos on medical themes: Obamacare, pain, prostate disease, bad nurses, getting into medical school, colon disease, addiction, dozens and dozens more. "You’re gonna hear me snore!" he sings about sleep apnea to the tune of Katy Perry’s "Roar." "Friends With Low Platelets," is a Garth Brooks takeoff on a blood condition. "Big Pharma" parodies Biggie’s "Big Poppa."

Pharmaceutical companies, currently enjoying a bumper wave of new drug launches, are struggling to get recently introduced products adopted in key European markets as governments bear down on costs…. Europe remains a much tougher market than the United States, prompting many companies to offer significant price discounts… European healthcare providers are also pushing hard for the use of cheap alternatives, where available, including...biosimilars.

..when it comes to HIPAA compliance…the day of reckoning is coming for more covered entities..and now for business associates…OCR (Office for Civil Rights) is inching closer to conducting more HIPAA audits..including audits of business associates…next round of HIPAA audits brewing, and covered entities started receiving questionnaires…seeking...to identify business associates…The relentless move of health data to the cloud, and the exponential growth of an ecosystem of business associates providing a vast array of services to covered entities mean that the potential exposure of protected health information to breaches.. is enormous.

Eric A Wright, PharmD, MPH, investigator I for Geisinger Health Research and associate professor at Wilkes University, discusses communication obstacles that hinder community pharmacists from playing a more active role in transitions of care.

..Indian TB drugmaker has been hit with a WHO (World health Organization) Notice of Concern but an independent audit carried out by its customer Svizera Europe disputes the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) violations raised…The facility is run by Svizera Labs Private Limited…and manufactures a number of anti-tuberculosis drugs… firm failed to provide adequate controls to stop the contamination of products,..observing uneven floor, crumbling walls, and black mould inside a drain which also held stagnant water… Quality manager at…Svizera Europe is disputing the WHO’s findings.

Salesforce is taking its biggest stab yet at conquering healthcare. The $5 billion cloud computing behemoth…unveiled Salesforce Health Cloud. Salesforce, best known for its customer relationship management platform, considers Health Cloud a patient relationship management product…moon-shot goal is to leapfrog electronic medical records as the central patient record. It promises to cull data from as many sources as possible, safely manage that information, let patients easily access these records and display the information in a dashboard to help healthcare providers and payers better manage – and in some cases, predict – care.