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Pat Basu, MD, MBA, chief medical officer of Doctor on Demand, discusses legislative issues and technology that could affect pharmacy.

Pay-Per-Click advertising sites, primarily search engines, are largely unaware of the new regulations governing 503B Outsourcing Facilities. Pay-per-click advertising has been one of the main ways non-compliant compounding pharmacies have been able to sell their products and services to hospitals, physicians and patients. Outsourcing Facilities of America is working to educate PPC advertising companies on the regulatory requirements… create new policies and procedures to stop non-compliant compounding pharmacies from selling their products in violation of these regulations.

William Rogers, MD, director of the Physicians Regulatory Issues Team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will act as ICD-10 ombudsman to the federal agency, He will work out of an ICD-10 coordination center in Baltimore.. Implementation of ICD-10 is only 34 days away… CMS has said it will not deny claims as long as the right code family is used, the agency will not send back a message if the wrong code is used.

'Now that you have all this data, what do you do with it?'..everyone's got an EMR…providers are also making use of ancillary technologies to help harness patient data toward more efficient care and better outcomes...But...are still surprisingly underused…the next step of optimization is going to require analysis and utilization of all these large data sets, and really clear insights on best practices."…We asked Schuchardt (dir. of market intelligence,HIMSS) to weigh in on the HIMSS Analytics list, offering his thoughts on the potential of each.

1. Bed Management
2. Business Intelligence
3. Data Warehouse
4. Dictation with Speech Recognition
5. Enterprise Master Person Index
6. Enterprise Resource Planning
7. Executive Information Systems
8. Financial Modeling
9. Infection Surveillance System
10. Laboratory (Molecular Diagnostics)
11. Laboratory (Outreach Services)
12. Medical Necessity Checking
13. Nurse Communication System
14. Nurse Staffing/Scheduling
15. Patient Portal
16. Physician Portal
17. Single Sign-on
18. Staff Scheduling

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

QS1 announced…that it would be partnering with…FDS to brings(bring) its customers… business intelligence software myDataMart...pharmacy owners can receive detailed analytics into the state of their business operations and potentially increase their Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Star ratings,..aid in monitoring adherence among patients,..

• Samsung LabGeo PT10 - private patient kiosks...with a new point-of-care lab technology
• Higi Kiosks - cloud-based interactive..for health-and-wellness tracking, data sharing..patient education
• RxASP 1000 - prescription packaging system… accommodate up to 1,000 RFID canisters
• CoBot - new robotic technology…PharmASSIST CoBot…ease workflow and perform "mindless repetitive tasks"
• Surescripts optimizes tech, expands applications - new capabilities is an electronic prior-authorization feature that allows prescribing physicians to check any patient’s insurance eligibility for any prescription automatically, at the touch of a screen, before sending that prescription to Surescripts’ routing network

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.

'Throwing out the prescription pad' is key to preventing fraud and abuse..With e-prescribing of controlled substances now legal nationwide, providers and pharmacies are empowered with a new technological tool in the fight against prescription painkillers… there's some progress yet to be made on this front. NLR(National Law Review) points to statistics that show that while… one-third of pharmacies were equipped to handle eRx of controlled substances as of the end of 2013, just 1 percent of prescribers were able to do so.

As many as eight-in-10 health care executives say that their organizations have been compromised by at least one malware, botnet or other cyber-attack during the past two years, and only half feel that they are adequately prepared in preventing attacks…