As many as 100,000 patients die every year from hospital-acquired infections. It doesn't have to be that way. HAIs are eminently preventable. Tools exist that can significantly lower HAI mortality and morbidity rates and reduce an associated $6 billion in excess annual health costs.
The clinical success of an ongoing pay-for-performance (P4P) pilot project by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services requires extensive participation by health-system pharmacists.
Improvement of restricted drug distribution systems (RDDS) should be a key element of the reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA).
Pharmacy OneSource has a new Web-based software, called Sentri7, that can monitor medication, laboratory, and patient data.
Pediatric patients are disproportionately affected by improper and wrong-dose errors in perioperative settings.
Now that we have electronic record technology, how should we set up a postmarketing surveillance system for drugs, biologicals, and medical devices?
Diabetes is a deadly, common and costly disease, so the debate about biogenerics is ardent when it concerns insulin. The drug is expensive and indispensable, and scientists agree that creating generic insulin is simpler than creating most other potential biologic equivalents.
A 70-year-old woman, T.R., has been transferred from an extended care nursing facility to your hospital with symptoms of fever, dyspnea with respiratory difficulty, cough, and sputum production. Her current medications include methadone 200 mg/ day (pain syndrome), risperidone (Risperdal, Janssen) 2 mg twice daily, digoxin 0.125 mg daily, and furosemide 20 mg twice daily.
The 2007 Polyanalgesic Consensus Panel recently recommended major changes to the guidelines for treatment, via intraspinal infusion, of patients suffering from severe chronic pain.
New warnings the Food & Drug Administration has issued about erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs) have prompted many practitioners to change the way they practice, while others remain unconvinced.
These are the top 200 brand and generic drugs by wholesale acquisition cost (WAS) dollars used in hospitals last year. The data were provided by Wolters Kluwer Health, Pharmaceutical Audit Suite (PHAST), January to December 2006.
The FDA has approved the combination of sitagliptin (Januvia, Merck) and metformin for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes.
Patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome with constipation or chronic constipation will no longer have the option of treatment with tegaserod (Zelnorm).
Liver transplant patients with a prior history of hepatitis B (HBV) can now receive HepaGam B, from Cangene Corp., to prevent reinfection.
In March, Drug Topics conducted an exclusive on-line poll that asked, Should condoms be locked up in pharmacies?
Last September, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) reported an incident that occurred at a Midwestern hospital. A pharmacy technician had stocked an automated dispensing cabinet with heparin 10,000 units/ml vials in a drawer reserved for heparin 10 units/ml. The nurses retrieving the vials did not notice the discrepancy in strength and used the 10,000 units/ml heparin for umbilical line flushes of six premature infants. Three of the babies died of heparin overdose.
Practice standards and innovation are the chicken and egg of health-system pharmacy practice. For regulators, more demanding standards of practice are the impetus behind innovations that improve patient care and outcomes. Joint Commission standards, for example, are designed to improve patient care and patient outcomes. The commission doesn't care how health systems meet new practice standards, just that the standards are met, noted commission surveyor Darryl Rich.
In recognition of the many shining stars who have guided the profession over the years, Drug Topics caught up with four leaders who have helped shape the practice of health-system pharmacy. These luminaries discussed some of the pressing issues they faced during their tenure at the helm of ASHP as well as their opinions about the future of the profession.
Serving the informational needs of hospital pharmacists has always been a high priority for Drug Topics. While every issue of the magazine has some articles of interest to hospital R.Ph.s, a concerted effort to reach them is made in every second issue of the month with our Health-System Edition (HSE).
Though modest at its inception, the arc of growth of hospital pharmacy as a specialty area of practice has been virtually unprecedented in its impact and scope. Since August of 1942, when 162 stalwarts formed the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists in Denver, the role and scope of pharmacy practice in American hospitals have evolved into a central and critical element of patient care. Much of this growth is a function of the increasingly important and complex nature of drug therapy in hospital care and the overall growth of acute care in our healthcare delivery system.
Today's hospital pharmacists have evolved to such a point that many pioneering pharmacists like Charles Rice and Harvey A. K. Whitney might not recognize their own profession.
The next 25 years hold promise of more clinical involvement and collaboration ? and more respect for pharmacists.
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities of the future will look more like hotels or office buildings and less like the institutional and often inconveniently designed buildings that many think of today, said Greg Lasker, an assistant professor of building construction management at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. According to Lasker, Clarion North Medical Center in Carmel, Ind., is a precursor of what hospitals of the future will look like.
During the past 50 years, advances in technology have enabled pharmacists to become more efficient and more accurate during the typical day, while simultaneously giving pharmacy personnel more time to interact one-on-one with patients.
A frail 75-year-old man, T.W., has been admitted to your hospital. He has a fever of 102°F, along with bloody diarrhea and abdominal pain. Prior to his admission, T.W.'s medications included the following: valsartan (Diovan, Novartis ) 80 mg daily, metoprolol 25 mg daily, aspirin 81 mg daily, simvastatin 40 mg daily, warfarin 3 mg on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and 2 mg on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. (T.W. suffered a myocardial infarction six months ago.) His last INR was 4.0. Because he had been hospitalized 14 days prior for S. pneumoniae pneumonia that was treated with ceftriaxone, the admitting physician suspected a C. difficile infection, which was subsequently confirmed by the lab. The physician has now ordered metronidazole 500 mg three times daily for T.W., and your computer flags that as a significant drug interaction. What do you recommend to the physician?
