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Because current health care practice focuses on diagnosing and prescribing, the need to taper, reduce, or discontinue inappropriate medication therapy receives relatively little attention. Few clinical guidelines cover drug deprescribing, and this lack of evidence-based direction contributes to prescribers’ hesitancy or reluctance to touch treatment regimens that may have originated from a different practice setting. But failure to deprescribe medications that are contributing to adverse side effects can have serious consequences,...

Lisa Kroon, PharmD, CDE, professor and department chairperson of clinical pharmacy at University of California, San Francisco, School of Pharmacy, talks about some ways smoking cessation can improve patient health and manage chronic conditions.

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

Pharmacy Board of Australia (the Board) has released revised guidelines that provide guidance to the profession on a range of issues.

Pharmacists are urged to read the revised guidelines published today:

• Guidelines for dispensing of medicines
• Guidelines on practice-specific issues,
• Guideline 1 Reference texts for pharmacists
• Guidelines on dose administration aids and staged supply of dispensed medicines, and
• Guidelines for proprietor pharmacists.

Jessica Kerr, PharmD, CDE, and assistant department chair at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville discusses potential barriers to inhaled insulin, like Afrezza.

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

..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.

Roche Chief Executive Severin Schwan criticized Britain's health system…after two of the company's cancer drugs were dropped from use, calling it a "stupid" way to control costs that could jeopardize research in the country… Schwan said there would be also knock-on effects for research in Britain, since if drugs like Avastin were not available as standard then Roche would not be able to do certain clinical trials in the country…Eventually, this will hurt us on the research side in the UK…

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.

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.