There’s a dangerous curve in my neighborhood. A dusty road descends a tree-lined hill and turns sharply. The pavement is broken and rutted on one side so that cars traveling in both directions steer onto a single smooth lane. Collisions have been averted (so far), mainly because few cars travel this section of road. However, [...]
Problem: Sample medications are often available in a variety of settings, including clinics, physicians’ offices, and hospital outpatient units. Most often, samples are dispensed without computer screening for drug interactions, duplicated therapy, allergies, or contraindications and without another practitioner’s check.
The federal government’s drug industry fraud bloodhound—no, not James Sheehan, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia—has drafted some guidelines on how pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) might stay on the right side of the law. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of Health and Human Services is the one that does the initial [...]
The use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) has risen more than 18% in the hospital setting in the last two years. Using data from our Hospital Diagnosis and Therapy Audit (HDTA), comparing the second quarter of 2002 with the same time period in 2000, MediMedia USA, Inc., evaluated patient characteristics such as age, sex, and [...]
David’s idea, in a nutshell, is as follows: “Any new prescription drug program should incorporate mechanisms to inform Congress and the public about the benefits or harms associated with the program and create incentives to prescription drug plans, providers, and consumers to make effective use of the new benefit.”2 Under this new Medicare drug benefit [...]
By now, most readers of P&T are familiar with the series of recent reports from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that are encouraging health care organizations and purchasers to implement policies that would enable health care to become more “safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable.” These Washington-based policy makers from the IOM have exhorted [...]
Too often, marketing efforts, contractual agreements with purchasing groups or vendors, and costs serve as primary sources of information when decisions are being made about which medical products to purchase and use. Evaluation and input from users of the products are not always sought, and the potential for errors might not be considered ahead of [...]
