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After a successful pilot program with Kroger’s pharmacies, Ohio’s prescription drug monitoring program is the first in the United States to offer advanced analytics for pharmacists and health care providers...The State of Ohio Board of Pharmacy is working with Appriss Health, provider of a comprehensive platform for substance use disorder, to enhance the state’s PDMP, known as Ohio Automated Rx Reporting System...The PDMP now provides NarxCare, an advanced analytics and patient support solution, to Ohio prescribers and pharmacists, in clinical workflow and via OARRS, to assist in clinical decision-making and promote patient safety. The analytics are available for free to Ohio healthcare providers and pharmacists accessing OARRS via electronic health records and pharmacy management systems...NarxCare...aggregates and analyzes prescription information from providers and pharmacies...then presents visual, interactive information — as well as advanced analytic insights, complex risk scores...The system also provides tools and resources that support patients’ needs and connects them to treatment, if necessary.

Continued industry investment in advanced biologics will raise further regulatory challenges and require innovative manufacturing systems...The challenges in producing cellular and gene therapies and other cutting-edge products that meet standards for safety, efficacy, and quality was high on the agenda for biopharmaceutical companies at PDA/FDA annual joint regulatory conference...

• Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research...is expediting the development and approval of human cellular and tissue products...vetting new regenerative medicine advanced therapies, including those utilizing gene-editing technology to treat malignancies and diseases...
• National Institutes of Health...cell biology and tissue engineering to advance regenerative medicine...these products require very different manufacturing and dosing processes and raise multiple challenges for scale-up and for keeping cells alive during processing...
• CBER’s Office of Tissues and Advanced Therapies...devising standards for characterization and potency assays for regenerative products, stem cell therapies, therapeutic vaccines, gene therapies, antivenins and certain combination products…importance of controlling the manufacturing process for these products and...challenges in achieving the right level of product characterization based on critical quality attributes.

Canada is set to begin deploying a national electronic prescribing platform, called PrescribeIT...Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded, nonprofit digital health organization, said...that it has reached agreements to enable PrescribeIT in six provinces: Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland/Labrador. Those provinces represent 61% of the Canadian population...PrescribeIT will allow prescribers to securely transmit an prescription from an electronic medical record to the pharmacy management system at a patient’s pharmacy of choice...PrescribeIT’s features will include the ability to securely send e-scripts for all medications, including controlled substances; deliver a prescription to a patient’s pharmacy; send prescription renewal requests from a pharmacist to a prescriber; and cancel a transaction by the prescriber or pharmacist...PrescribeIT is expected to decrease patient wait times for their prescriptions, enhance patient safety by reducing the possibility of medication errors, improve medication management and patient health outcomes, reduce fraud and abuse by eliminating handwritten prescriptions, ensure data integrity for monitoring of controlled substances, and create a commercial-free prescribing and dispensing environment...

Pharmaceutical companies hope computers can help them find new medications that are faster, cheaper—and more likely to be effective...The idea is that machines, which are adept at pattern recognition, can sift through vast amounts of new and existing genetic, metabolic and clinical information to unravel the complex biological networks that underpin diseases. That, in turn, can help identify medications likely to work in specific patient populations, while simultaneously steering companies away from drugs that are likely to fail...In the past, drug companies have used artificial intelligence to examine chemistry—whether a drug might bind to a particular protein, for instance. But now the trend is to use AI to probe biological systems to get clues about how a drug might affect a patient’s cells or tissues...Biological insights driven by machine learning also could help pharmaceutical companies better identify and recruit patients for clinical trials of therapies most likely to work for them, perhaps boosting the chances of those medications’ getting approved by regulatory agencies...The big difference between AI-driven drug trials and traditional ones...is "we’re not making any hypotheses up front. We’re not allowing [human] hypotheses to generate data. We’re using the patient-derived data to generate hypotheses."

The discount giant is using a shelf-scanning robot to detect out-of-stock items, incorrect prices and wrong or missing labels. The initiative is an effort to automate tasks that are repeatable, predictable and manual for its associates, Walmart spokesman Justin Rushing said in the retailer’s blog...Using data and vision technology, the wheeled robot roams store aisles ready to simplify routine, but time-consuming tasks. On-hand robots are making it easier for personal shoppers to fulfill online orders, as well as freeing up associates to serve in-store shoppers...Jeremy King, chief technology officer for Walmart U.S. and e-commerce, said, “The robots are 50% more productive than their human counterparts, and can scan shelves significantly more accurately and three times faster.”...This is not Walmart’s first try at adding automated, robotic solutions. The discounter continues to expand its fleet of “Pickup Towers,” massive orange vending machines where shoppers can retrieve their online orders in less than a minute...The discounter was also recently granted a patent that would allow the chain to use drones to shuttle merchandise between departments and dedicated delivery locations within its stores...

It was an audacious undertaking, even for one of the most storied American companies: With a single machine, IBM would tackle humanity’s most vexing diseases and revolutionize medicine...promoting its signature brand — Watson — IBM sought to capture the world’s imagination, and it quickly zeroed in on a high-profile target: cancer...But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM’s goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market...While it has emphatically marketed Watson for cancer care, IBM hasn’t published any scientific papers demonstrating how the technology affects physicians and patients. As a result, its flaws are getting exposed on the front lines of care by doctors and researchers who say that the system, while promising in some respects, remains undeveloped...

New legislation to deliver a real-time prescription monitoring system in Victoria has been welcomed by the peak national body for pharmacists, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia...Legislation introduced into the Victorian Parliament...will establish the legislative framework for a Victorian real-time monitoring system...PSA Victorian President Benjamin Marchant said PSA welcomed the long-overdue system, which will support clinical decision-making by prescribers and pharmacists to optimise use of medicines and save lives in Victoria...“The system will allow timely and relevant information to be shared among prescribers and pharmacists, ensuring potent medicines are used safely,” Mr Marchant said. “The system will identify people at risk of harm and provide referral pathways for pharmacists to support our patients...“PSA supports the Victorian legislation’s mandatory requirements for prescribers and pharmacists. The system should be integrated and streamlined for prescribing and dispensing software to ensure it is effective and useable.”...

Allergan Plc’s decision to pay a Native American tribe $15 million a year rather than let one of its blockbuster drugs be scrutinized by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office is part of a backlash against an agency review panel that has been dubbed a “death squad.”...The drugmaker earlier this month transferred ownership of patents protecting a medicine with $1.49 billion in sales last year to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe of upstate New York. The tribe, which will receive royalties every year, says that as a sovereign entity it is immune from such civil patent challenges....The creative -- and untested -- maneuver is designed to circumvent the Patent Trial and Appeal Board...critics say the board has made it too easy for rivals to attack patents and they’re pressing Congress, the courts and the patent office for changes...companies such as Google or Apple Inc., which are among the biggest users of the review board to fend off what they consider nuisance lawsuits from companies looking for a quick payday...the Supreme Court agreed to take a case to determine if the reviews are constitutional -- critics of the reviews say a patent is a property right that only federal courts can revoke. But even those who want to see the system dismantled say that case is a long shot...The patent office has been considering changes to its procedures...

The use of health IT has exploded in the last decade, and that means better health care...Electronic health records, computerized prescriber-order-entry systems, and barcode-assisted medication administration systems have now become almost universal in hospitals nationwide...According to the “ASHP National Survey of Pharmacy Practice in Hospital Settings: Prescribing and Transcribing — 2016,” nearly 100% of hospitals across the United States have adopted these technologies...Survey results reveal that the use of health IT by hospitals has led to a rapid increase in “paperless care.”... ASHP CEO, Paul W. Abramowitz, PharmD, said in a statement that, in addition to improving medication safety, the increased use of information technology shows great potential for pharmacists to spend more time providing comprehensive medication therapy management in and across all settings of patient care. “These positive findings move us closer to achieving ASHP’s vision that medication use will be optimal, safe, and effective for all people all of the time.” Abramowitz said.

Computer simulations may get a role alongside human testing as part of an effort to bring new medications and medical devices to market more quickly and cheaply...The...Food and Drug Administration outlined a proposal...to help integrate computer modeling and virtual testing as part of the regulatory approval process for manufacturers -- a step the agency said could save money while helping find cures for puzzling conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease...The average cost of developing a new medication is about $2.56 billion...and much of that goes to fulfilling the FDA’s rigorous demands for proving safety and effectiveness...The price of new technology affects the ability of people to access these new treatments...We therefore need to be mindful of the costs of our regulatory processes, to the degree that these costs also affect the availability of new innovations, and the way that they are ultimately priced…The idea of computer simulated experiments, sometimes called in silico trials, has been around for years but the FDA hasn’t provided guidance to allow the drug industry to use it in testing...The FDA has begun using computer modeling to build databases to help researchers predict how new treatments...will perform. And the agency is developing a family of "virtual patients" for testing new devices…