The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) is making available a free report titled
The Prescription Infrastructure: Are We Ready for ePrescribing?. Though most prescriptions are done in outpatient and ambulatory care settings, hospitals are also part of the e-prescribing picture as electronic medication administration record (eMAR) would benefit from integration with outpatient medication history. It would make sense for patients to have records that would track their overall health care history, and this would save hospital physicians from chasing family doctors over the phone to obtain prescription information.
Right now pharmacy systems are developped independently for various segments of the health care universe, leaving integration concerns to later times. According to several sources compiled by the report, hospitals and clinics account for 10.5 percent and 9.3 percent of pharmacy purchases respectively, though the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services accounts for these drug costs as part of hospital spending, not pharmaceutical spending.
more...
January 31, 2006
Related topics:
Pharmaceuticals, IT & software
JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published
an article advocating that doctors in teaching hospitals and elsewhere should forgo the various types of gifts offered by drug and medical device manufacturers. Of course federal law forbids physicians from being paid by firms to prescribe their products, but "softer" gifts and consulting contracts between the former and the later can still generate conflicts of interest. According to this
New York Times article, all the golf trips, vacations, meals and other gifts showered on doctors by drug companies add up to tens of billions of dollars, ahead of R&D or direct-to-consumer advertising (aka DTCA, which is however prohibited in many countries as far as prescription drugs are concerned).
more...
January 25, 2006
Related topics:
Ethics & Scandals, Trends
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