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Mobile apps and games becoming critical 'adjunct to clinical care management'. The Personal Connected Health Alliance and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society are partnering with the Games for Health Project to help increase the role of personal health technology in care delivery, convening clinical leaders and innovators with gamers and game developers.

Good: Convenience, convenience, convenience. More locations means more places to get treatment and possibly less waiting times. Bad: Cost. Will less competition in the market mean higher prices?

Remember when participating in a community brown bag consult was mandatory in pharmacy school? Students would arrived prepared with drug references in hand, ready to go through all of the medications that patients brought with them. Focusing more on the patient than the drugs can potentially make a bigger impact on outcomes and quality of life.

Having pharmacists on primary care teams monitoring the treatment of blood pressure in patients with Type 2 diabetes have a significant impact on improved outcomes, according to a study published in the May/June issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association.

.......patients can receive different-looking tablets or capsules every time they refill their prescription when generics are dispensed. With such wide variation in a single medication’s appearance, and with constant interchanging of products as a result of drug shortages and generic equivalents, both patients and health care practitioners have become somewhat complacent about double-checking when the tablet, capsule, or liquid looks different.

"Further consolidation in the retail setting means pharmacy services are increasingly available only from a fewer number of larger entities. The CVS-Target deal reinforces the need and strengthens the case for allowing patients to use 'any willing pharmacy' that accepts a drug plan's terms and conditions, such as reimbursement. "Patients in underserved rural and inner-city areas rely on access to independent community pharmacies for prescription medication and counseling. For these and some other patients national pharmacy chains are not a practical option.

Like many professionals, physicians take time off to raise children, care for sick family members or to recover from their own illnesses. Some want to return from retirement or switch from non-clinical jobs back to seeing patients. But picking up where they left off is more difficult in medicine than in most careers........ change occurs quickly. Drugs, devices and surgical techniques that were standard a decade ago may now be obsolete.

"There's no way Silk Road could be reasonably expected to reduce violence," Federal District Court Judge Katherine Forrest said at the recent sentencing hearing for Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of the Silk Road online drug market. But if people are buying online, there's no turf to fight over -- "with Silk Road functioning to considerable degree at the wholesale/broker market level, its virtual location should reduce violence, intimidation and territorialism,"

A pharmacist is being praised for coming to the rescue in a hostage and robbery situation. The hostages were kept in the back room of the store until pharmacist Donna Weatherford was able to convince Trail (the burglar) to let the other hostages go, while she remained behind to gather the requested drugs. Weatherford seized the moment to pick up the burglar’s gun and run outside, where police were waiting.....

I can’t recall ever seeing the leader of an ongoing trial express major doubts about the value of a drug or publicly differ with the sponsor about its potential significance. (And yet, somehow, so many of these promising breakthrough products have failed utterly.) ..... this doesn’t mean that the opinions of trial leaders should be ignored or that they have no value. But it does mean that the audience for these opinions should be fully aware of the full context of the remarks, and that additional sources should be sought.