Drug Topics Link

MTM Link

If you have not reviewed the current opportunities for cognitive services reimbursement, I emplore you to explore.  For years pharmacists have tried to get paid for services such as counseling, medication therapy review, and clinical therapy management.  MTM, or Medication Therapy Management is a pilot program from CMS (Center for Medicare Services) that does just that.  CMS has provided guidelines for third party payors to accept and pay pharmacists.  This is our chance to advance clinical pharmacy service.  Chances are many private insurance carriers will jump on the bandwagon if MTM is successful.  Pharmacy can team together to make this successful. 

eWeek Link:

NCPA Article Link

eWeek Link The FDA will start requiring standards for certain electronic labels, starting in June of this year.... The FDA wants us to use standards to communicate, such as always calling a “heart attack” a Myocardial Infarction, and so on. This will apply to drug names and nomenclature as well. This goes in line with recent legislation to ensure standard submission formats for prescription drug format. Standards can always be viewed as beneficial to the whole, but they bring chaos initially.

E-Week Article Link

Healthcare bloggers teaming up to create a compendium and encyclopedia of clinical tools online. Now this sounds like a plan. IBM is backing a group of bloggers and helping them create a 'wiki' for clinical content. I plan on taking a look, and might even contribute an article or two!

NCPA Article Link

How do you feel about having your entire medical record stored on a plastic card that fits in your wallet? This senator believes it will help save lives. Certainly it is helpful if you are incoherent and emergency services needs to treat you. However, funding and identity theft are at the forfront of many comments. First, funding this type of federal program means sharing information. Some of that information has the potential to be shared with parties which the individual may not approve. Secondly, I am not convinced we are this advanced with healthcare technology in 2006 to implement this type of system. Should we not get the majority of your healthcare systems running electronic health records before we make this information portable? Should we look at a way to share information over the wire as necessary? I think hackers and identity thieves are ready for this technology. I am not sure you and I are.

eWeek Artlicle

Did you know that all manufacturers are required to put a barcode on each dose by April 26th, 2006? This applies to inpatient pharmacy practice in hospitals and long term care environments.

We all agree that barcoding is a necessary step to improving patient safety. Hospital technology adoption remains as the most challenging step for the healthcare team. It is great to have barcoded medications, but useless if the hospital does not have IT infrastructure and automation systems to utilize them. These closed-loop medication administration systems cost millions to implement, and more to support.

It appears I am not the only one interested in podcasting about pharmacy. Andrew Christian at Pharmcountry.net is on #3!

His focus is on general pharmacy news, keeping us all up to date!

Andrew and I are going to get together in the next few days and chat. Thanks Andrew!

E-week Article

Now, the federal government is offering training and financial incentices to providers who want to adopt Information Technology. This is another way to help win over the early adopters in Healthcare. As pharmacists, we can play a large roll in helping providers with technology solutions. We are very used to computer systems, but most of healthcare is still on paper. Help them kick the paper pushing by supporting their efforts to adopt technology.